Solana, a modern blockchain platform and one of the best smart contract platforms, looks at a screenshot shared by an observer on X, It has been achieved. Great achievement.
Over the past seven months, the platform has maintained an unusually high uptime of 100%, shaking off the criticism that has plagued the network over the years since its launch.
Solana has been online for 7 consecutive months.
With this achievement, Solana is now close to achieving the longest streak of consecutive periods of continuous uptime. Overall, this highlights the progress the platform has made to ensure stability and reliability. In theory, Solana, like Ethereum and other public ledgers, should maintain a high uptime of over 99.9% due to its architecture.
The Solana network relies on a pool of validators distributed across the globe. Regardless of disruptions in one part of the world, for example, assuming a mass withdrawal of validators, the network will continue to operate and draw its power from the remaining nodes. While this would have been ideal, it has not been the case, especially for the latest blockchain models that prioritize high throughput and low fees.
Since their launch, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and most of the older chains have been reliable and have never gone out of service. On the other hand, Solana has been struggling, especially when there is a spike in on-chain transactions, which puts pressure on the online nodes.
Despite the progress made, there have been annoying outages in the past, especially in 2023. Whenever Solana goes down, most analysts question the platform’s resilience and whether the network is a true blockchain.
Earlier this year, in February 2024, Solana went down, and its nodes stopped processing transactions. The outage was fixed to a software flag but was quickly patched.
Firedancer will enhance reliability.
To address these concerns and restore trust, the team has worked to significantly improve reliability. For this reason, concerted efforts and resources are being directed towards strengthening Solana’s architecture, ensuring that the platform remains online, regardless of demand on the chain.
Jump Crypto has been actively building Firedancer, a data validation client that offers a modular design. Once launched in 2025, it will improve transaction processing efficiency and significantly reduce the risk of network failure.
Some of the expected additions from Firedancer include the introduction of parallel transaction processing that will further boost throughput while reducing latency at the same time.
Featured image from Canva, chart from TradingView