Solana Strategy Head Austin Federa On Network Glitch, We Will “Overcome”

Considering the number of outages and network problems that Solana (SOL) has experienced in the last couple of months, Austin Federa, the network’s Strategy Head believes that there is still a way to make the most of the situation.

Massive Demand Behind The Network Woes

In the last two days, Solana has been challenged by some network congestion that leads to transaction delay or failure. 

According to the explanation offered by the network’s developers, the primary concern regarding network congestion has been identified to stem from a QUIC implementation and the behavior of the Agave validator client. 

Federa acknowledged the occurrence of these glitches, citing that the Solana network has been seeing demand greater than that of other networks. In Federa’s opinion, this is a stress test for the entire Solana ecosystem and a type that can not be modeled in simulation. He tried to explain how every network goes through a phase like this at some point or the other.

Solana sees traffic and demand that no other network has ever come close to — it’s a stress test of the whole system. These are exactly the type of stress tests you cannot model in simulation, you have to just see how stuff works in prod and adapt.

The scaling and bug squashing…

— Austin Federa | 🇺🇸 (@Austin_Federa) April 6, 2024

The Solana Strategy Head mentioned the case of CryptoKitties on Ethereum and Ordinals on the Bitcoin blockchain. In the long run, experiencing the congestion and fixing it is bound to make the Solana system better, per the statement from Federa. More importantly, he highlighted that Solana has constantly demonstrated that it possesses the capacity to overcome stress tests like this. 

“Time and time again Solana has shown it can overcome today’s bottleneck in search of tomorrow’s,” Federa said on X.

Solana Plans Lasting Solution to Recurrent Outages

He empathized with those who have truly been affected by the network congestion, stating that the Solana team is working on fixing the problem. 

Meanwhile, the network glitches have led Solana engineers to also collaborate with other core contributors to diagnose and address bottlenecks while enhancing overall network performance. The core developers plan to commence the release of fixes as of next week.

On the other hand, one Crypto X user believes that the congestion and Solana outages are not a function of massive demand. 

Rather, he thinks that it is a problem of some bots spamming the system. Federa’s response to this was the fact that “humans may interpret and value different types of demand differently, but that’s not technically relevant.”