Public blockchain Solana has recently experienced severe congestion and frequent transaction failures. Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius Labs, a Solana ecosystem development platform, stated today that the current issue with Solana is not a protocol design flaw but rather a bug in a specific implementation. The fix for this bug is expected to be released on the 15th.
(Table of Contents:
Helius Labs: Bug fix on 4/15
Reason for the surge in Solana transaction failures
Firedancer expected to solve the problem)
Amidst the hype of meme coins and the surge in mining projects like Ore, the Solana network has been facing serious congestion issues. The non-voting transaction failure rate on the Solana network reached a record high of over 75% on the 4th before slightly decreasing to 65% currently.
The unresolved congestion issue prompted Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius Labs, a blockchain infrastructure company specializing in providing backend support for the Solana network, to announce today that Solana developers plan to fix the error causing the surge in transaction failure rates on the 15th. He emphasized that the current problems faced by Solana are not design flaws but rather implementation bugs.
Mert Mumtaz explained that the current issue causing the surge in Solana transaction failure rates is related to the way Solana developers implemented QUIC, a data transfer protocol developed by Google that allows all nodes to join the network’s current state.
In Mert Mumtaz’s view, this issue should not be seen as a holistic design flaw. Using the analogy of car design, he pointed out that all cars have four wheels and an engine, but there are many different ways to implement car designs, such as BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, F1, and Tesla. If a particular BMW model has poor steering performance, people would not say that all cars have flaws. Instead, they would say that a specific model has a problem that needs to be fixed. Similarly, Mert Mumtaz stated that Solana’s QUIC implementation has specific flaws and errors.
Mert Mumtaz also shared the comments of Solana researcher Richard Patel, who believes that the implementation of Firedancer, the second node validator for Solana developed by Jump Crypto, will prevent the same issues from occurring. The mainnet for Firedancer is expected to launch in the first half of this year and aims to reduce the single-point risk caused by a single client and improve node client diversity and Solana blockchain stability. It is expected to increase Solana’s throughput by 10-100 times.