Solana Developers Test Congestion Fixes in Testnet, Introduce Measures to Prioritize Traffic

Anza, a collective of developers focused on the Solana blockchain, has produced a fix that aims to reduce the congestion that the network has been experiencing. The new version of Solana, now being tried in testnet, includes a feature called stake-weighted quality of service (SWQOS), that prioritizes transactions from higher quality validators.

Solana Gears up to Fight Congestion, Passes Fixes to Testnet

Solana developers are working hard to deal with the congestion that had impaired network operation before. Anza, a Solana-dedicated collective, announced a new version of the blockchain software and urged validators to upgrade as swiftly to analyze the changes’ effects on the network.

Solana testnet v1.18.11 includes a new feature called stake-weighted quality of service (SWQOS), a mechanism that devs chose to tackle the congestion issue that made seven of each ten transactions fail at one point. SWQOS is a prioritization scheme for transactions from other staked validators, classified as “good.” While other connections will still have the possibility of being processed, 80% of the connections linked to validators will be reserved for SWQOS.

Tim Garcia, Lead of Validator Relations at the Solana Foundation explained:

Whenever the network is getting high traffic you’d want a way to prioritize good connections. The idea is that staked validators are incentivized to use the connections to send useful transactions.

This effectively makes transactions from other staked validators more likely to be processed and creates a web of trust between actors in Solana. Users would benefit directly from using trusted decentralized apps, as RPC nodes will implement this new feature.

While congestion has subsided, at the time of writing, almost every six out of ten non-voting transactions are failing in Solana. Nonetheless, top wallets in the Solana ecosystem like Phantom have deployed fixes to enhance their users’ experiences and transaction success rates.

There is still no date approving these fixes, as the efficiency and secondary effects of implementing SWQOS must be first examined in testnet.