Solana (SOL) plans to introduce a new fee system as well as several other improvements to the Solana blockchain as part of an effort to combat its repeated issues and outages.
According to an explanation from Solana Labs, Solana suffered a network outage over the weekend when Solana’s main-net beta cluster “ceased producing blocks as a result of stalled consensus.” The outage or “crash” as some refer to it, comes at a bad time for Solana as the Ethereum competitor is already reeling from publicized network and performance problems in September and December of 2021 as well as another issue in January 2022.
Solana Labs willingly admits that the network has suffered “intermittent congestions issues” since early January and states that the issues are due to bot activity targeting non-fungible token (NFT) mints. This also caused the most recent outage, according to the Solana (SOL).
“An enormous amount of inbound transactions (6 million per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100 Gbps of traffic at individual nodes. There is no evidence of a denial of service attack, but instead, evidence indicates bots tried to programmatically win a new NFT being minted using the popular Candy Machine program.”
Solana also retweeted a statement from twitter handle “@solanastatus” explaining the April 30th 7 hour outage and the investigation into the cause of the issue.
Solana did add that the network continued to work at transaction request levels that were 10,000% of the level that caused the September outage, a large improvement it attributes to upgrades to the blockchain implemented since the issues experienced last September.
Solana is currently working on core-protocols-related mitigation to mitigate and possibly solve the issues the network has experienced.
“In order to affect control over network traffic, Solana core protocols are being reimplemented atop QUIC, a protocol built by Google, designed for fast asynchronous communication like UDP, but with sessions and flow control like TCP. Once adopted, there will be many more options available to adapt and optimize data ingestion.”
In addition, Solana states that fee prioritization work updates are being worked on by developers.
“Solana’s fee prioritization should only impact the specific state, and not the whole block. This creates a system akin to ‘neighborhood fees’ instead of ‘global fees.’ The subsequent transactions that are paying a higher fee, but can’t fit into this block because they have hit the maximum limits of writing to an account are spilled and scheduled for the next block, but other transactions that interact with other accounts can still be added to the same block, even if they are paying lower fees.”