CEO and co-founder of Solana Anatoly Yakovenko have outlined a plan focusing on improvements for speed and scale while acknowledging that maintaining stability remains a challenge.
Up until the 1.14 release, core engineers were trying to resolve real-time issues that were affecting the network’s speed and usability, according to the blog post.
These issues included invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions and fee markets, spiraling ram, storage, and restart overhead.
“Over the last 12 months, Solana Labs and third-party core engineering teams have also been working to improve the network and will continue to do so with a focus on stability,” the blog read.
These measures include building an additional validator client that works on increasing the network’s throughput, efficiency, and resiliency.
Transitioning network communication to QUIC, a more advanced networking protocol as well as improvements to RPC infrastructure to reduce their load, it added.
Yakovenko’s announcement centers around last week’s 1.14 network update where the Solana network faced a slowdown in block production on Feb. 25.
The incident caused massive disruptions to transactions and forced validators to downgrade the software in a bid to restore network performance.
The technical outage began at around 6:00 am UTC, prompting validators to downgrade to version 1.13 to restore transactions in the network.
The choice to restart the network on version 1.13.6 was made because, despite the downgrade, normal operations remain suspended.
Solana CEO Shut Down Rumours
The Solana Foundation stated in a post on February 27 that it was still unclear what caused the 20-hour network outage.
Yakovenko, however, responded to claims that the network disruptions were brought on by a large number of validator messages and the on-chain voting system clogging its consensus layer on Twitter.
The co-founder referred to the theory as “pure stupidity,” but he didn’t specifically refute DBCryptoX’s assertion that 90–95 percent of Solana transactions consist of these validator messages and on-chain votes, which DBCryptoX claimed had contributed to “bogging down the system.”
Brandon Tucker, the growth lead at the liquid staking protocol Marinade Finance, chose to see things in a different way.
According to him, an upgrade to the technology will significantly enhance the SOL blockchain and “slash” future network freezes, even though Solana’s numerous outages continue to be a stain on the blockchain.
The Solana blockchain was successfully revived twice after going offline for 20 hours.