On May 27, the Solana community voted to allocate 100% of priority fees collected from network users to network validators, with a 77% majority.
Previously, Solana (SOL) priority fees were evenly split between validator rewards and the token burning mechanism.
Since late 2023, the price of Solana’s native token (SOL) has significantly increased, reaching a peak of $210 in March 2024 and currently trading around $171.
Despite high price performance, Solana continues to face congestion issues and outages, leading to network downtime at least four times.
The first major outage occurred in September 2021, when bots exacerbated network congestion, causing a 17-hour downtime.
In December of the same year, Solana crashed again due to high traffic. Later that month, the network faced new issues due to the sale of SolChick gaming tokens.
In 2023, Solana experienced another major outage due to high network traffic. Validators initially believed the issue was related to a software update, but reverting to a previous version did not resolve the problem.
Validators manually restarted the network using a stable software version, and normal operations were restored.
Following a series of outages, Solana developers assured the community that fixes would be implemented but did not rule out the possibility of future outages.
These issues are linked to high transaction throughput. According to CoinGecko, Solana reached a record level of 1504 TPS on April 6, 2024.
This makes Solana the fastest blockchain network to date, surpassing the current first-layer Ethereum speed, as it strives to balance reliability with high transaction throughput.
