In response to recent congestion issues on the Solana blockchain, Anza Network has announced plans to implement updates aimed at alleviating these challenges.
Confirming the upcoming changes, the Solana-focused software development firm stated, “Significant progress has been made to overcome the current congestion challenges, and we expect to begin releasing fixes next week. In collaboration with other core contributors, we have analyzed the root cause and evaluated several potential changes.”
This announcement follows a series of network congestion incidents on Solana, marking the second occurrence within a 48-hour period, causing transaction delays and failures for users.
Anza Network Diagnoses and Addresses Solana Congestion Causes
Anza Network, on Friday, April 5, attributed the congestion to a combination of QUIC implementation issues and the behavior of the Agave validator client.
Efforts are now underway by Anza engineers and other core contributors to diagnose and rectify these bottlenecks.
These updates are part of a broader strategy to enhance Solana’s network efficiency, with further improvements expected in the coming months.
The urgency of the situation was highlighted on April 4, when Solana experienced a 75% failure rate for all non-vote transactions amidst increased network activity, according to Dune Analytics. This surge was largely driven by the rising interest in meme coins on the platform.
The high failure rate has sparked concern within the Solana community, with dissatisfaction over the declining service quality.
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius and a prominent Solana supporter, suggested that transaction failures were exacerbated by “bot spam,” rather than inherent network instability affecting genuine user transactions.
This perspective sheds light on the challenges facing Solana, particularly with the influx of meme coin transactions.
The network’s congestion issues have garnered attention from Andre Cronje, creator of Fantom, who emphasized Solana’s rapid growth and increased demand for block space as the primary causes of current challenges.
Cronje described these issues as technical hurdles, distinct from flaws in the network’s consensus mechanism, portraying Solana as a “victim of its own success.”
This isn’t the first time Solana has faced downtime. A notable instance occurred in early February when its main network stopped processing blocks for over five hours.
Since January 2022, the blockchain has encountered approximately six major outages and 15 days with either complete or partial service interruptions.
Anza’s postmortem report of the February outage identified a bug in Solana’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache as a contributing factor.
The recent network congestion issues have adversely affected Solana, with the price of SOL dropping by 10% in the past week and currently trading around $177.
Following this weekly decline, SOL has reverted to its position as the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization ($78.4 billion), as reported by CoinMarketCap.
As Solana works to address these challenges, the community awaits the implementation of Anza’s proposed fixes and further improvements to the network’s stability and efficiency.
