Layer by Layer: Solana's Struggles Continue as New Network Issues Surface

The Solana ecosystem has faced a litany of challenges over the course of its relatively short lifespan. Between a string of network downtime incidents in the early half of 2022 to an exodus of investor capital following the FTX/Alameda collapse in late 2022, the Solana network has been a prime example of the complex problems that must be continually addressed in the course of developing a new, highly performant blockchain. Solana’s troubles again bubbled to the surface recently during the rollout of its latest mainnet upgrade, v1.14.16, which unexpectedly led to extensive forking of the chain and significantly degraded block finalization starting on February 25th. 

The network subsequently went into a vote-only fail-safe mode intended to facilitate the process of achieving consensus among validators, effectively pausing user-initiated transactions and any meaningful financial activity. The chart below shows transactions on the network dropping significantly on the day of the incident, similar to a previous network outage in October 2022 that was ultimately resolved with a full network restart.