Solana has become a booming topic of discussion throughout the last few months. The network became home to hundreds, if not thousands, of meme coins, and many are touting it as the better alternative to Ethereum.
The reasons are simple – Solana is quicker and cheaper. A transaction on Ethereum can cost upwards of $100 during peak network utilization, whereas the same swap on Solana would usually cost less than a cent.
But it doesn’t come without its issues.
Solana’s Network Outages and Congestion
While Solana supporters promote quicker transaction times, increased throughput, and cheaper costs, those who oppose the network often point out that it is more centralized and less secure than Ethereum.
Solana has been shut down on several occasions. For example, earlier in February, the network went offline for hours before engineers were able to bring it back up.
Throughout the past few months, many have also been complaining that getting a transaction to pass is virtually impossible because of how congested the network was on occasions.
Now, developers have pushed a Mainnet update that’s designed specifically to resolve these issues.
Mainnet update v1.17.31 went live earlier to specifically combat network congestion.
Among the changelog are points like:
- Show staked vs. nonstaked packets sent down/throttled
- Quic: use smallvec to aggregate chunks, save 1 alloc per packet
- BankingStage Forwarding Filter
- Treat super low staked as unstaked in streamer QOS
- Tighten the minimal streams per 100ms for staked node
Anza – a Solana developer – has also asked validators to upgrade to the latest patch only once there’s less than a 5% delinquent stake.
Solana Price Bounces off Recent Lows
The broader cryptocurrency market crashed throughout the weekend, with Solana dipping below $130 earlier on April 14th.
The price has since bounced and is currently trading at around $154, up 7.5% for the past 24 hours alone.
The broader market is also recovering, with BTC topping $66K, and ETH surging past $3.2K. It’s interesting to see if the uptrend will sustain or if it’s the so-called “dead cat bounce.”
