Blockchain Network Solana has been one of the biggest winners of the recent bull rush, with its token gaining more than 780% in value over the past year. As the rise in popularity has led to the network experiencing more traffic than ever before, making sure the network is able to handle the stress has become a priority.
With this purpose in mind and despite the network having remained stable despite the increased load, the Solana team has taken action.
An upcoming core protocol change and recommendations to developers were shared via X (formerly known as Twitter), both seeking to ensure the “continued high performance” of the Solana ecosystem.
https://t.co/8Q1Hp35RQN
— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) March 15, 2024
As one of the so-called “Ethereum killers”, being able to sustain the increasing traffic and congestion is essential to Solana. Ethereum has been widely criticized for being unable to handle high traffic, a story that repeated just recently with the ERC-404 craze.
Securing Network Stability
To prevent Solana from failing to handle its meteoric rise in popularity, its team has changed its focus to reinforcing its infrastructure to handle the growing transaction volumes. These efforts require developers to take actions like implementing priority fees, optimizing program CU (computing unit) usage, CU budget request optimization, and using stake-weighted QoS.
The suite of optimizations recommended by the Solana team aims to fortify the network’s capacity to handle escalating usage without sacrificing performance. Broadly, the measures promote more judicious use of limited blockchain resources like block space and computing power, while enhancing prioritization mechanisms.
On its end, the Solana team will be implementing changes to its core protocol by improving its transaction scheduler, an important upgrade to the protocol. Set for the upcoming v1.18 mainnet release in April, the scheduler is expected to improve the creation of blocks and the ordering of transaction execution.
Solana Turns Four
Solana was launched on March 15 of 2020, meaning the network turned 4-years old last week. The network is now handling 24-H trading volumes of over $12B, greatly outperforming networks like Binance Smart Chain, Cardano, and Avalanche. Today, the network’s currency sits at the top 4 by market capitalization, getting closer to surpassing Tether.
Solana’s co-founder Raj Gokal took to X to celebrate the network’s birthday by highlighting the challenges the team had to overcome to get to this stage. Among these, Gokal highlighted the effects of the pandemic during the network’s early days, which led to a lack of trust from institutional investors.
To investors, one of the major concerns from investors in the early days was whether Solana could operate at a scale. Gokal, on the other hand, believed that “the only way to prove that it actually works is to launch it.” Four years later, the network has proven that its design can indeed work at a scale, handling traffic that few other networks have had to deal with in the past.
Celebration Incoming!
The festivities around Solana’s birthday and recent success are expected to prolong over the next months, especially with Solana Crossroads coming. As Solana’s largest annual community conference, the event will highlight the new opportunities and challenges the network will face over the next few years.
Solana Crossroads will take place from May 10 to May 11, 2024in Istanbul, Turkey. Over 3000 people are expected to attend the 2-day event, which will feature around 50 speakers from all over the world. The list of speakers includes Solana’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, CoinGecko’s co-founder Bobby Ong, Star Atlas’ CEO Michael Wagner, and Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal.
With adoption in Turkey rising by over 40% in 2023, the country has become one of the fastest-growing markets for blockchain technology. As the locals continue to embrace crypto, events like Solana Crossroads serve as a catalyst to foster further innovation and mainstream integration within the region.
