Austin Federa: Solana’s strategy against network challenges

Given the number of outages and network issues Solana (SOL) has experienced in recent months, Austin Federa, the network’s head of strategy, believes there is still a way to make the most of the situation.

Massive demand behind the network problems

In the last two days, Solana has been challenged by some network congestion leading to transaction delays or failures.

According to the explanation provided by the network’s developers, the primary concern regarding network congestion has been identified as arising from a QUIC implementation and the behavior of the Agave validator client.

Federa acknowledged the occurrence of these glitches, noting that the Solana network has seen demand that exceeds that of other networks. In Federa’s opinion, this is a stress test for the entire Solana ecosystem and a type that cannot be modeled in simulation. He tried to explain how every network goes through a phase like this at some point.

Solana’s Strategy Head mentioned the case of CryptoKitties on Ethereum (ETH) and Ordinals on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. In the long run, experiencing the congestion and resolving it will benefit the Solana system, according to Federa’s statement. More importantly, he emphasized that Solana has consistently demonstrated the ability to overcome stress tests such as these.

“Time and time again, Solana has shown that it can overcome today’s bottlenecks in the search for tomorrow’s,” Federa said on X.

Solana plans permanent solutions for recurring failures

He sympathized with those actually affected by the network congestion, stating that the Solana team is working to resolve the issue.

Meanwhile, the network issues have also led Solana engineers to work with other core contributors to diagnose and address bottlenecks while improving overall network performance. The core developers plan to start releasing fixes starting next week.

On the other hand, one Crypto

Instead, he thinks it’s a problem of some bots spamming the system. Federa’s response to this was the fact that “people may interpret and value different types of demand differently, but that is not technically relevant.”