A much needed upgrade for Solana
Known for its speed and low fees but unfortunately it has been plagued with degraded performances recently. Will this patch be enough to propel it forward?
Since the start of 2022, there has been quite a few stability issues where it affected the performance of the network. Although the low fees of Solana made it possible for some of the issues to be created, it remains to be one of the key factors that got me interested in trying the network out.
Its true that the low fees actually opens up an opportunity for certain users to spam their transactions, flooding the network rendering it un-useable at times. This is no doubt a critical issue since if the chain cant work, its pretty much useless. If this is not being resolved asap and when more people leaves the ecosystem, it might not be easy to get them back again.
On the other hand, the high gas fees of certain chains does deter this kind of behavior but does not completely get rid of it. I for one don’t think that we should look at it as though it was a feature built for this purpose cause at the end of the day what we want is for more adoption, more organic growth and users that will keep using the chain day in day out, not just between the same whales or sharkssss.
For the past 6 months or so, we have seen many things happening on the Solana chain. Things like degraded performance, prolonged degraded performance, “DDOS” on the chain, bots spamming for liquidations, bots spamming the network in order to mint NFTs and also where it lost track of time and ran 30mins behind our current real time.
Solana already has much “hate” online already, (VCs holding on to most of the allocation, centralized chain..) all this network issues just makes it worse, giving it quite a bad taste. One way to look at it is that, with the growth that Solana has experienced from its inception till now, is this something that each chain will have to go through eventually?
Issues that only surface after its adoption grows beyond a certain level? So it could be a “positive” thing to go through now, rather than later, showing that there is actually a demand to use the chain. Personally, I really look forward to this patch and hope that it will resolve the stability issues, at least for now.
As always, thanks for reading and enjoy this photo of a dolphin, 😆
In the recent upgrades, changes were being implemented to improve the stability and reliability of the network. There are 3 mains things to talk about,
1QUIC
Before we talk briefly about QUIC, it would be good to mention about UDP and TCP.
UDP — User Datagram Protocol. This is used where the nodes will be transmitting data to the leader in the network. You can think of it like sending packets of data via multiple lanes which will end up to the leader.
Due to the volume of the traffic, it is possible for some of the data to be lost. So its natural for the senders to send multiple times to increase the chances that it will succeed.
TCP — This required a connected session between the sender and leader first. Once confirmation has been given that the data has been received, the sender will stop sending.
You can think of it like sending data along a single lane where there is a controller letting you know if your data has successfully been sent, else you should try to send it again.
But the downside to this would be that, if there is some data lost in between. The other data will have to wait before this is completed first.
QUIC — This is like the best of both worlds. Where there is a connected session which allows the leader to know which node is sending multiple data (spam) and “slows” them down without stopping the rest of the other data from coming in normally.
2Stake weighted QoS
I think the implementation of this stake weighted Quality of Service (QoS) is to in a way still maintain the usability of the network during when high traffic conditions are present which is way more than what it can handle.
Given that its stake weighted, those nodes with more SOL staked would stand to gain more since it would mean that those txn they send will result in more confirmations.
Those nodes with lesser staked SOL can send their txns over to those nodes with more staked SOL in hopes that they will have a better chance to get confirmation too since those nodes will forward it to the leader.
Remember that we talked about the QUIC earlier on, even if this node has quite a lot of SOL staked, the validator would be able to identify that there is an exceptionally high traffic coming from this node and can choose to ignore it in order to maintain the performance of the network
Of course, if all the nodes behaves in this manner, the network will just get congested eventually. So this is just part of the solution
3Fees changes
Other than the fixed fees which Solana currently has, there will be a new fees being implemented called priority fee. What this does is that users will be able to state an additional fee to be collected once the txn is confirmed and finalized.
With this, there is no need or no point to send duplicate txn to spam the network, in hopes of getting the txn through. This is pretty similar and reminds me of the low, average, high gas fee on Ethereum.
This additional fees will also be paid to the validators (50%) and the other 50% will be burned.
With the combination of all the 3 points mentioned above, I think it should be effective enough to prevent another prolong degraded network performance. The QoS to deter users, usually bots from spamming their txns to the leader and then the additional fees for those who need their transaction to go through.
If they do walk down that path, they get their txns confirmed and there is no need to spam the network. Its a win win for all.
This is quite an effective solution for this congestion issue and I’m kinda looking forward see how the network will perform when it gets stress tested, like an event where high TPS is required.
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As always, thanks for reading! 🙏
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