Solana Developers Rush to Resolve Congestion Issue Caused by High Demand

Solana (SOL), celebrated for its rapid transactions and scalability, recently grappled with a significant outage, sparking intense discussions within the crypto sphere.

The surge in transaction failures, surpassing 75% in recent days, raised doubts about Solana's capacity to manage increased network activity.

This congestion prompted users to explore alternatives, such as Ethereum, Solana's long-standing competitor.

Concerns about Solana's future as a leading Layer-1 blockchain were also ignited by these events.

The fluctuation in SOL's price against Ethereum, particularly amidst Ethereum's recent record-breaking performance, further intensified the debate.

Reports from users of the popular Phantom wallet highlighted prolonged transaction times and an uptick in failed transactions, mainly attributed to the surge in meme coins and liquid staking activities on Solana's DEXes.

Matt Sorg, Product and Tech strategist at the Solana Foundation, provided clarity on the notable rate of failed transactions, emphasising that it is not a flaw but rather an intentional feature aimed at safeguarding users.

An intriguing observation is that over 80% of these failed transactions are attributed to error code “0x1771”, signifying an exceeded slippage amount.

Essentially, failed transactions arise when users attempt to leverage volatile Solana meme coins, which exhibit varying prices across different Solana DEXes.

Consequently, if the price surpasses the user's predetermined slippage amount, the transaction is destined to fail—a mechanism deliberately embedded within the network.

However, Matt underscored that the primary concern lies not with failed transactions but with dropped transactions, which fail to be included in the final block for various reasons.

Solana's Congestion Issue's Root Cause

In a recent statement, Austin Federa, Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation, provided insights into the underlying cause of the congestion and the ongoing efforts to mitigate it.

Before delving into the specifics, he acknowledged the dedicated efforts of developers to rectify the Solana congestion, which has resulted in the failure of over 75% of transactions.

On X (previously known as Twitter), he wrote that:

"Developers from Anza, Firedancer, Jito, and other core contributors are working diligently (and not sleeping much) to shore up Solana’s networking stack to meet the unprecedented demand the network is seeing today.”

He also acknowledged the existence of varied opinions on the root cause of the congestion.

However, he emphasised that fundamentally, it stems from the inadequacy of the software system to effectively handle the current volume.

He pointed out that:

"At a high level the issue is conceptually simple: the implementation of a software system is today not robust enough to handle the amount of traffic being thrown at it.”

Furthermore, Austin addressed the technical debt within Solana's architecture, highlighting the challenging balance between prioritising new developments and essential maintenance tasks.

Potential Solutions Explained

In terms of potential solutions, Austin mentioned that the team is actively focused on augmenting transaction per second (TPS) rates and, if deemed necessary, adjusting fees as a final measure to discourage spam activities.

However, the team primarily aims to devise mechanisms for spam filtration without solely relying on fee modifications.

Additionally, he assured the community that despite the setback, core protocol developers are actively implementing and testing improvements to alleviate the Solana network outage.

Austin gave his reassurance:

"Core protocol developers from across the ecosystem are working as swiftly as they can to implement and test improvements in the networking stack to address the current network congestion.”