Anza Network’s Objective: Resolving Solana’s Congestion Issues

Anza Network is preparing to implement updates in order to resolve the recent problems with congestion on the Solana blockchain.
“We have made significant progress in addressing the current congestion challenges and anticipate that fixes will be rolled out next week,” confirmed the software development firm focused on Solana. “Working alongside other key contributors, we have identified the root cause and evaluated various potential changes.”
This latest development follows a series of congestion incidents on the Solana network, with the second occurrence taking place within a 48-hour period. These incidents have resulted in transaction delays and failures for Solana users.
Anza attributed the congestion to a combination of issues with QUIC implementation and the behavior of the Agave validator client.
Engineers at Anza, in collaboration with other core contributors, are actively working to diagnose and resolve these bottlenecks.
These latest measures are part of a wider range of improvements that will be implemented in the coming months to enhance the efficiency of the Solana network.
The urgency of the situation was highlighted by a concerning trend on April 4, when Solana experienced a 75% failure rate for non-vote transactions amidst a surge in network activity, according to Dune Analytics. This spike in failures was primarily linked to the growing interest in meme coins on the platform.
The high failure rate has sparked a debate within the Solana community, with many expressing dissatisfaction with the declining service quality.
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius and a prominent supporter of Solana, suggested that the issue of transaction failures was amplified by “bot spam,” rather than a fundamental network instability affecting genuine user transactions.
Mumtaz’s claim sheds light on the challenges faced by Solana, which have been compounded by the blockchain’s popularity, particularly in the context of meme coin transactions.
The network’s congestion problems have also caught the attention of Andre Cronje, the creator of Fantom, who has voiced his support for the Solana network. He emphasized that the current challenges stem from the network’s rapid growth and increased demand for block space.
Cronje characterized these issues as technical hurdles, distinct from flaws in the network’s consensus mechanism, and described Solana as a “victim of its own success.”
This is not the first time that Solana has experienced downtime. In early February, the main network stopped processing blocks for over five hours.
Since January 2022, the blockchain has encountered approximately six major outages and has experienced 15 days with either complete or partial service interruptions.
Anza’s postmortem report on the February downtime revealed that a bug in Solana’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache was a contributing factor.
The recent network congestion issues have had a negative impact on Solana. The price of SOL has decreased by 10% in the past week and is currently trading at around $177.
Following this decline, SOL has once again become the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization ($78.4 billion), according to CoinMarketCap.