Solana Update Brings First Fixes for Congestion Issues

The first network update to begin addressing weeks of growing congestion that made Solana incredibly difficult to use as of late rolled out for validators early Monday.

Anza, the dev team that spun out of Solana Labs earlier this year, announced overnight that the v1.17.31 release of the Agave validator client—which is run by the computers that support the Solana network—was released with initial fixes for the congestion issues.

It’s not meant as a singular fix for the issues that have recently plagued the network, but rather a first step with more fixes on the way. According to Anza, this update “contains enhancements which will help alleviate some of the ongoing network congestion, and will be followed by further enhancements in v1.18.”

Solana’s network issues, which have stymied transaction attempts and other basic use cases, have come amid rising trading for meme coins and other tokens on the network. But there are other potential causes in play, including a Solana protocol that’s akin to Bitcoin mining, as well as accusations that infrastructure firms have been exploiting a bug to gain an advantage.

The Solana Foundation has said that the network’s woes are being caused by a “known bottleneck in the implementation of QUIC used on the Agave validator client,” the organization’s Head of Strategy Austin Federa tweeted last week. It was set to be fixed in the future, but rising network demand forced the issue.

Anza had been testing the update in recent days, and deployed a version to the Solana testnet on Friday, asking validators to “upgrade ASAP.” No official timeline has been set for the v1.18 upgrade, but developers are already warning that it too won’t be a silver bullet solution.

“Does this ‘solve all Solana congestion?’ No. Early tests indicate it does improve fee collection (picking more valuable incoming [transactions]) on the part of validators,” tweeted Anza’s Rex St. John. “Full impact will not be known until it has been tested in production.”

One-third of all validators are now running the v1.17.31 version of the validator client, according to data from blockchain explorer Solana Beach. Version 1.17.28 remains most used among validator operators, running on nearly 49% of all machines.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.