By
Steve Muchoki
May 16th, 2024
Top Solana innovator has shared a crucial network update post-congestion, highlighting how the worst user experience era has passed
Vibhu Norby, a top Solana developer who doubles as the CEO of Drip Haus, took to X recently to share reflections into Solana network trajectory within the last five months. He also highlighted insights into the platform’s future endeavors.
According to Norby, December to April was a mix of activities for Solana, both exciting and challenging. He stated that the network saw a “huge wave” that included a peak at 160,000 Daily Active Users (DAUs) and an onboarding of more than 500,000 users during this same time.
On the other hand, Solana also recorded several low-quality wallets on its platform.
Multiple Congestion Hit Solana Network
The overall excitement was rather short as the massive influence caused the network to experience frequent congestion by early March. This Solana network congestion which led to transaction errors rendered the chain unusable for a significant portion of March. For all Decentralized Applications (DApps) on Solana, this was a “sobering” time.
Multiple project launches were impeded including Solana’s first cultural Altcoin project Duck Coin, which announced a delay in an X post. Non-fungible token (NFT) project Suit Up, also decided to suspend its launch to a later date. 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.
The Solana network developer team swung into action, hastily developing scaling solutions that would have taken up to one year to implement under normal circumstances. Part of these scaling solutions was a new feature called Stake-Weighted Quality of Service (SWQOS). This feature allows block producers to spot and focus on transactions passing through staked validators, thereby adding an extra layer against faking identities.
Anza, the developer of one of Solana’s Agave validator clients, also announced the release of a solution patch to alleviate Solana’s congestion difficulties. After repeatedly trying many of these solutions, the network began to function properly again and its block time returned to 2 seconds.
Solana Focus on The Future Post Congestion
Solana is now looking at entering a new phase, with key foundations set out to determine its sustainability and growth. The first is developing a swift response to congestion issues by accelerating scalability solutions.
Solana developers are keen on avoiding a recurrence of the outages, therefore, it understands the need of a system that can conveniently accommodate large volumes of transactions without triggering slowdowns.
Norby highlighted the focus on “p5 DAUs”, a custom measure for highly engaged users. This underscores the importance of attracting users and equally cultivating a base of dedicated ones.
The huge Solana wave bw Dec and April was exciting and challenging
We peaked at 160k DAUs and saw more than half a million people onboard onto the platform. Many many low quality wallets but it is what it is
It ended with congestion starting March 2, and the chain getting…
— vibhu (@vibhu) May 2, 2024
He claimed that the platform currently sees as much as 25,000 highly engaged users daily. Post congestion, some of Solana’s products have been improved upon and Drip Haus CEO noted that this has brought users’ satisfaction and retention.