Binance Corroborates Solana Network's Congestion Issues

Solana’s congestion problem continues to devour the L1 network with the latest grumbles coming from Binance users, prompting the exchange to issue a notice on Tuesday.

“The Solana (SOL) network is currently experiencing congestion due to an increase in high compute transactions, which is reducing its network capacity to several thousand of transactions per second and leading to some failed transactions for users.” The notice reads.

Owing to this congestion, Binance has notified users that it will be pausing withdrawals via the Solana network at different intervals to avert any further damage. “We are actively working with the project to provide a stable, long-term solution. We apologize for any inconvenience.” 

Solana’s Congestion Problem Persist

A sneak-peek into Solana Beach, last week’s problem seems to have persisted with multiple failures appearing on the transaction dashboard.

On January 6, the network’s developers put out a notice on its status twitter page stating that the network was experiencing degraded performance as a result of high compute transactions leading to failed transactions for some users. Its Co-founder, Anatoly Yakovenko later denied reports that the network had suffered a DDoS attack, claiming that it was just a congestion issue.

But whereas Solana’s woes are being caused by, well, “a good thing”-that is, “increased user and DApps activity,”  its continued congestion could hurt its reputation or worse, force users to look elsewhere for solutions.

New Validator Release To Stop Congestion

According to Tomáš Eminger, Head of Validator Infrastructure at Rockaway Blockchain Fund, slowdowns on the Solana network could however be solved by the 1.8.12 version, the latest validator release for the network.

Although the Solana team has denied reports of the network halting, the congestion has at times caused the network’s throughput to decrease from 3000tps to 1000tps.

“The low Solana network throughput correlates with long transaction execution times (called “replay times”) – sometimes reaching 13 seconds,” says Tomáš.

He, however, says that this is set to change with the new validator version. “The slow replay times are caused by recompilation – when the exec environment had to recompile the program (smart contract). Recompilation happens when a program is evicted from cache. Eviction was caused by a bug, which was solved in version 1.8.12.“

Currently, the new 1.8.12 version is deployed only on 15% of the network to monitor the congestion situation. Once enough validators have installed the new release, he hopes the situation will change for the better, a fact that Yakovenko approves.

At reporting time, Solana has given back roughly 40% of its entire 2021 gains and is trading at $152.

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