Solana Will Improve Network Upgrades to Improve Stability

Solana Labs will make improvements to its software upgrade process to ensure network reliability and uptime, co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said on Tuesday.

“Delivering a fast, reliable and scalable network in order to move toward a better, decentralized web remains a top priority,” Yakovenko said in a blog post. “The issues around last week’s 1.14 network update – which focused on improvements for speed and scale – made it clear how maintaining stability during these major updates remains a challenge.”

Yakovenko said last week's 1.14 network update had raised concerns about maintaining stability during major updates.

Prior to the 1.14 release, core engineers were working on fixing problems that were impacting the network's speed and usability, such as invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions, and lack of fee markets, among other more technical issues. These issues were prioritized to improve user experience.

But following the latest release, core engineers plan to bring in additional external developers and auditors to test and find exploits. They will also form an adversarial team comprising almost a third of the Solana Labs core engineering team.

The core engineers will continue supporting external core engineers, including Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team, which is building a second validator client.

Additionally, core engineers plan to improve the restart process by making nodes automatically discover the latest confirmed slot and share the ledger with each other if it is missing. Solana Labs and third-party core engineering teams have been working to improve the network over the past year, with a focus on stability.

“For example, Jump Crypto's Firedancer team is building a second validator client to increase the network's throughput, efficiency, and resiliency. Mango DAO developers are focused on the tooling needed to build on Solana,” Yakovenko said.

The comments came following a lengthy weekend outage for the Solana blockchain. The problems that started as sluggish transaction processing spiraled into a near-complete shutdown of activity on Solana. Developers said Monday the reason for a network-wide outage over the weekend was still unclear but investigations are ongoing.