On May 27th, the Solana community overwhelmingly voted in favor of a significant change to the network’s fee distribution. Previously, the priority fees generated by network users were split evenly between rewarding Solana’s validators and the token-burning mechanism of the Solana network. However, with a margin of 77%, the community decided to allocate 100% of the priority fees to the network validators.
Solana, represented by its token SOL, has experienced a remarkable surge in price since the end of 2023. In March 2024, the token reached a peak of approximately $210 and is currently trading at around $171. Despite this impressive price performance, the network has been grappling with congestion issues and has encountered several crashes, leading to the network going offline on multiple occasions.
The first notable crash occurred in September 2021 when network congestion was exacerbated by bots, resulting in a 17-hour downtime for Solana’s network. Just four months later, in December, another crash occurred due to an unusually high volume of traffic. This same month, the network faced congestion issues once again during SolChick’s game token sale.
In 2023, Solana experienced yet another major network outage caused by abnormally high traffic. Initially, Solana’s validators attributed the crash to an upgrade in the validator software. However, rolling back to a previous version of the software failed to resolve the issue. As a solution, the validators manually restarted the entire network using the most stable version of the validation software, which successfully restored normal activity.
Following these high-profile network crashes, Solana’s developers assured the community that bug fixes and other improvements would be implemented on the Solana blockchain. Nevertheless, they did not dismiss the possibility of future crashes. These network outages seem to be a consequence of Solana’s ability to handle a large number of transactions per second. According to CoinGecko, the Solana blockchain has consistently achieved remarkable transaction-per-second metrics, reaching a record high of 1,504 TPS on April 6th, 2024.
This exceptional transaction throughput makes Solana the fastest blockchain network by a wide margin, surpassing Ethereum’s current layer-1 speed. Solana strives to strike a balance between reliability and cutting-edge transaction throughput as it continues to establish itself as a leading player in the blockchain industry.