Anza Network is gearing up to implement updates to address the recent congestion problems on the Solana blockchain.
“We have made significant progress in overcoming the current congestion challenges and anticipate the release of fixes starting next week,” confirmed the Solana-focused software development firm. “Working closely with other core contributors, we have identified the root cause and are considering various potential changes.”
This latest development follows a series of congestion incidents on the Solana network, marking the second occurrence within a 48-hour period that has resulted in transaction delays and failures for Solana users.
On Friday, April 5, Anza attributed the cause of the congestion to a combination of QUIC implementation issues and the behavior of the Agave validator client.
Anza engineers, in collaboration with other core contributors, are diligently working to diagnose and resolve these bottlenecks.
These recent measures are part of a series of improvements expected to be implemented over the next few months to enhance the efficiency of Solana’s network.
The urgency of the situation was highlighted by a troubling trend on April 4, when Solana experienced a failure rate of 75% for all non-vote transactions during a surge in network activity, according to Dune Analytics. The spike was largely attributed to the increasing interest in meme coins on the platform.
The high failure rate has sparked a debate within the Solana community, with many expressing dissatisfaction with the declining service quality.
Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz, a prominent advocate of Solana, suggested that the issue of transaction failures was exacerbated by “bot spam” rather than an inherent network instability affecting legitimate user transactions.
Mumtaz’s assertion sheds light on the challenges facing Solana, which have been amplified by the blockchain’s popularity, particularly in the context of meme coin transactions.
The network’s congestion issues have also caught the attention of Fantom creator Andre Cronje, who has voiced support for the Solana network, emphasizing that the current challenges stem from the network’s rapid growth and increased demand for block space.
He characterized these issues as technical obstacles, distinct from flaws in the network’s consensus mechanism, and described Solana as a “victim of its own success.”
In a related development, developers of Solana meme tokens have pulled out following a presale, adding to the network’s challenges.
This is not the first time Solana has experienced downtime. A significant outage 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 suffered from 15 days of either complete or partial service interruptions.
Anza’s postmortem report on 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 had a negative impact on Solana, with the price of SOL dropping by 10% in the past week and currently trading around $177.
Following the weekly decline, SOL has once again become the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization ($78.4 billion), according to CoinMarketCap.