Despite its past of unreliability, a Q2 2023 Solana Network maintained an 100% uptime in Q2 2023, according to the Solana Foundation’s Network Performance Report, representing one of many enhancements made to Solana’s network infrastructure and performance during the first half of the year.
The network, managed by an extensive, independent group of validators worldwide, has shown improvements across several performance metrics, including the ratio of non-voting-to-voting transactions, block production time, and transactions per second.
Dan Albert, executive director of the Solana Foundation, suggests that Solana’s performance is only part of the story, according to the press release. The network’s underlying decentralization is also a key point of focus:
“The first half of 2023 presented a number of challenges for the network but the network performed very well and more advancements in the ecosystem are on the way that will further distinguish Solana as the leading decentralized smart contract blockchain.”
Solana measures its network’s decentralization and vitality with four metrics: block-producing validators, RPC nodes, the Nakamoto Coefficient and active open-source developers on the network. The Foundation’s report reveals positive figures for all these metrics.
On the innovation front, state compression has debuted on Solana. This technique, which allows data to be stored directly on-chain, has drastically cut costs. For instance, minting 100 million NFTs on Solana now costs a mere 50 SOL.
After an outage on February 25, Solana made significant strides to improve its network software upgrade process, incorporating additional external developers and auditors into the release process, as well as enhanced server restart processes. Because of this, the network achieved full uptime since the intervention and seamlessly transitioned network version 1.14 to the mainnet.
Next on the list is adding Solana Improvement Documents-33, Timely Vote Credits, to the network in Q3, which is “intended to reduce block finalization times and disincentivize intentionally delayed voting,” according to the report.
