Solana had another outage last weekend and it took over 20 hours until transactions were transmitted again. This has been one of many incidents the high-speed blockchain suffered from in the past 12 months. Another outage just happened in January but was less severe than the last crash of the network. The worst part is that the cause of the last incident is yet unknown and developers are working tirelessly to resolve the issue.

How is Solana going to improve and what are the plans of Solana Labs to support the process?

Focusing on stability

According to a blog post from Anatoly Yakovenko, developers have been focused working on problems that concern speed and usability. It appears that network stability and user experience have come off short in that process.

A balanced approach seems to be the long-term goal to ensure that network outages become a thing of the past. Yakovenko revealed that Core engineers will improve the upgrade process by following a new routine before implementing changes on the mainnet-beta. Stability is also improved by teaming up with Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team which is building a second validator client.

Another part of the plan is forming an adversarial team consisting of nearly one-third of Solana Labs Core developers. They will focus on building additional hooks as well as instrumentations into the validator code.

Solana needs to improve

The fact that Solana has a history of outages lies heavy on the shoulders of developers, the community, and investors. Blockchain technology promises to be immutable, decentralized, and secure. A blockchain that needs a restart once in a while for unknown reasons does not fit that description.

Critics have been harsh every time Solana ran into problems. The most important part is that the teams and volunteers behind the technology keep contributing to turning it around. It appears that this is the case and that everybody onboard is working relentlessly to solve the remaining problems. Yakovenko emphasized that over 2,000 developers are working worldwide on different projects that are based on Solana.

This gives hope that the high-speed blockchain has a chance to recover from its problems and become a sustainable alternative to Ethereum and other competitors in this field. It remains to be seen if Solana is going to succeed in the pursuit of becoming one of the fastest layer-1 solutions available on the market.