Solana Labs’ Chief Exec Unveils Plan to Improve Network Upgrades After 20-Hour Outage

Solana attracted severe backlash from the community after it went down for almost 20 hours following a network upgrade. The team behind the blockchain stated that the outage was fixed on the second attempt.

Anatoly Yakovenko, the CEO of Solana Labs, however, stated that the platform plans on improving network upgrades.

Improving Network Upgrades

Before the 1.14 release, core engineers focused on fixing live problems that affected Solana’s speed and usability. This included invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions, and lack of fee markets, among other technical issues. Hence, enhancing user experience took a backseat.

In the latest blog post, Yakovenko said the aim for the core engineers now will be to work with validators to improve the process for software release rollouts by bringing in additional external developers and auditors to test and find exploits and continuing to support external core engineers.

This also includes Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team, which is developing a second validator client to “increase the network’s throughput, efficiency and resiliency.”

As part of the plan, an adversarial team has also been formed that consists of nearly one-third of the core engineering team at the Solana Labs. This one will double down on building additional hooks and instrumentation into the validator code to help detect exploits across the underlying protocols and provide hardware to run medium to large clusters for adversarial simulation.

Improving the restart process is yet another area that the core engineering team will work on. To that extent, the exec detailed,

“While fully automating the process is difficult, different kinds of failures can be solved with simpler procedures in an effort to improve the restart process. Nodes should be automatically discovering the latest optimistically confirmed slot and sharing the ledger with each other if it is missing.”

Meanwhile, Yakovenko further said Solana Labs has been working with third-party core engineering teams to focus on stability.

Network Activity

With the outages wreaking havoc, Solana’s NFT sales volume was recorded to be 84.8 million, down by 57% over the past 30 days. Data from CryptoSlam revealed that transactions also declined by nearly 30% during the same period, while buyers and sellers noted an uptick.

Moreover, the total value locked (TVL) in Solana was found to be at a little over $257 million, according to the latest data compiled by DefiLlama. The network has lost over 97% since forming a peak in November 2021 during the bull run when it skyrocketed to $10.3 billion.