Anza’s Upgrade Eases Solana Network Congestion, Details

These past days have been bad for projects and tokens in the Solana ecosystem as the network faced major issues due to congestion. 

Due to the congestion, almost 75% of on-chain transactions failed, triggering massive selloffs across Solana-based tokens. In the past 24 hours, many tokens like MEW, WIF, and BOME have plummeted due to this problem.

Amid these challenges, Anza, a Solana-based devshop, took action, releasing an update that is expected to resolve the congestion issue.

Anza Deploys v1.18.11 Release to Address Solana Network Congestion

According to an X post, Anza has rolled out version 1.18.11 to devnet, which is expected to fix Solana’s ongoing network congestion issue. Anza found that the network congestion mainly resulted from how QUIC was implemented and how the Agave validator client behaved. 

.@Solana testnet validators, the v1.18.11 release is now deployed to devnet, recommended for use on testnet. Please upgrade ASAP to help us start analyzing the effects of the proposed congestion fixes. https://t.co/8tcmtZ5tuQ

— Anza (@anza_xyz) April 12, 2024

Austin Federa, Solana’s head of strategy, highlighted software limitations and technical debt as factors contributing to recent congestion. He added that “the scaling and bug squashing is painful, but Solana is not alone in this.”

Working closely with other core contributors, Anza engineers are dedicating significant efforts to identify and resolve the issues. 

Meanwhile, to test the impact of their proposed fixes, Anza urged Solana testnet validators to upgrade to the latest release. “Please upgrade ASAP to help us start analyzing the effects of the proposed congestion fixes,” Anza developer said in the Tweet.

Notably, the latest update is specifically for the testnet, not the mainnet. According to an Anza developer, the congestion patch undergoes testing before hitting the mainnet. Once on the main net, it typically takes around two days to gain the approval of the majority of validators.

Other Solana Network Issues

On Feb 06 at approx.04:53 a.m. EST, the Solana network went offline temporarily, causing panic across the ecosystem. The team sprang into action, and upgraded to version 1.17.20, with validators restarted it together. And a few hours after the breakdown, the network started working at 9:47 a.m. EST. 

In a tweet, Matthew Sigel, from VanEck, mentioned on X that disruptions might stem from Berkley Packet Filter issues. He added that the mechanism, which helps with updates and running programs on Solana (SOL), had problems because of a recent upgrade. This upgrade contained a bug that removed a feature used to block metadata.

According to Sigel, they have identified a bug on the testnet and created a fix, which has yet to be implemented since it’s still in the testing phase.