By
Temitope Olatunji
April 29th, 2024
Because of the congestion, project launches have been indefinitely halted as Solana developers promise to roll out solutions next week.
The ongoing congestion on the Solana blockchain has forced multiple projects to postpone their launches on the network. For a while now, the blockchain has been experiencing network congestion, which has led to transaction errors. Consequently, a few new projects and tokens have suspended launching their products until Solana developers fix the problems.
Altcoin project Duck Coin, touted as the first cultural coin on Solana, announced a delay in an X post. Suit Up, a nonfungible token (NFT) project, also decided to suspend its launch until further notice. Similarly, Surge Finance delayed the launch of its SURGE token and decided to wait till “conditions improve enough for transactions to succeed” instead of specifying a new time slot.
Support for Solana and Fixing Congestion Issues
Solana-focused developer group Anza recently posted an X thread outlining steps taken to solve the problem. According to Anza, there already is significant progress made towards a solution, with fixes set for release next week. In one of the posts, Anza specified that the core issue is a QUIC implementation, as well as problems caused by Solana’s Agave validator client when trying to process voluminous requests.
As of this writing, an incident report posted by Coinbase 11 hours ago specifies delayed sends for SOL. However, the report notes that the congestion does not affect buys, sells, fiat withdrawals, and fiat deposits.
Fantom Network’s Andre Cronje has publicly posted in support of Solana. According to an X post, this problem is one of the “growing pains” expected of “every high throughput low fee network…with increasing demand for block space.” Cronje predicts that the developers will quickly figure out the problem and then roll out a solution that “optimizes fee markets faster and better than most seem to think.” In another post, Cronje agreed with a user who noted that although Solana developers will figure out a solution, the problem would be harder to fix than usual.
Last Friday, Coinspeaker reported that 75% of all non-vote transactions failed on the Solana blockchain, according to data from blockchain ecosystem analysis service Dune Analytics. The problem was reportedly due to a memecoin surge on the platform, which caused a congestion and piked the transaction volumes and user count on Solana.
Like Cronje, Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz spoke out in support of the blockchain. Mumtaz explained that the transaction failure rate mostly affected “bot spam” and not genuine user transactions.
SOL Waxing Strong
As of this writing, SOL is trading at $175.30 after losing nearly 4% over 24 hours and 3.4% in 7 days. Despite the loss and Solana congestion, Marketwatch data indicates SOL has gained more than 18% in 1 month and nearly 82% in three months. Year-to-date data also shows an increase, at 68%.
Late last month, Solana-based meme coin DogWifHat (WIF) became one of the top 3 largest meme coins after rising an impressive 28% in 24 hours to $3.97. Current CoinMarketCap data puts WIF at $3.94 with a market cap of $3.9 billion.