- Solana Labs says it is working on upgrades to improve the efficiency of the network.
- An adversarial team has been formed to assist the project’s engineers with a core focus on stability.
- Solana has been blighted by multiple downtime incidents, triggering an exodus of some of its projects to rivals.
Solana’s community is bracing for a wave of upgrades to the network barely one week after its 1.14 update, but this time the focus is not on speed or scalability.
Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has confirmed that the network is working on a slew of upgrades designed to guarantee network reliability and address the persistent downtime issues. Yakovenko disclosed the plans via a blog post, saying that the new upgrades will not be concerned with processing speed but will address stability challenges.
“Delivering a fast, reliable, and scalable network in order to move toward a better, decentralized web remains a top priority,” said Yakovenko. “The issues around last week’s 1.14 network update – which focused on these improvements for speed and scale – made it clear how maintaining stability during these major updates remains a challenge.”
To solve these problems associated with upgrades, Yakovenko says the developers plan to downgrade the testnet to the current mainnet-beta version before the widely anticipated mainnet-beta upgrade. Other processes include “upgrading the testnet to release candidates of the new version” while paying close attention to the migration and “stress-testing the testnet.”
Yakovenko announced the creation of an adversarial team to assist in finding potential areas of security breaches. The adversarial team will comprise one-third of Solana Labs’ core engineering team and will be saddled with the additional tasks of providing hardware to run clusters for simulation purposes.
“Developers were attracted to Solana because it lets them build things they can build nowhere else, but those developers also need a stable and predictable foundation,” said Yakovenko. “Core engineers are committed to making these changes so that reliability does not suffer for the sake of innovation and speed.”
A streak of network outages for Solana
At the tail end of February, Solana suffered its latest network outage that lasted multiple hours. According to the developers, the cause of the outage remains unknown, with users being unable to make transactions on the network.
In 2022, Solana suffered over six network outages, casting a shadow of doubt in the hearts of investors and developers. A torrid year resulted in the nearly $50 billion in value being wiped off the asset amid a mass migration of projects to rival blockchains.
