Solana would have had another network outage or congestion issue today. However, this did not happen because of the changes made by the developers.

"Solana is down again. Solana is offline. Solana always fails."

These are the common mantras often spruiked by members here.

What many fail to realise is the significant progress that has been made by the developers on the Solana blockchain in recent months.

So why does Solana seem to get congested?

In the past, when Solana experiences a larger than normal number of transaction requests, it slows down. Ethereum alleviates this issue, by raising the price of its gas fees. However, Solana does not, the fees remain the same, so the network becomes congested.

In some cases, the network becomes so congested, that transactions get interrupted or stalled, and the network goes offline. Stalls. It then needs to be restarted from the previous block by the validators.

What has changed?

Among the many improvements, the Google-supported QUIC protocol was implemented and stress testing has been underway for some time now. Validators have also been working hard to upgrade to the latest software to bring them all in line.

This was especially more difficult as another change made was also the number of validators is almost at 2000. Coincidentally, this has led to a vastly improved Nakamoto Coefficient of 32. Higher than most of its competitors.

Stress tests using the QUIC protocol

These tests have shown that the network is able to handle over 14000 transactions per second. For reference, most other major blockchains process less than 1000 transactions per second.

The average TPS rate on Solana usually hovers around ~3000

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So why was today special?

NFT Mints.

I'm not fond of NFTs, but I can't deny their success on the Solana chain. A much hyped token mint called Y00ts, was launched today. This brought a massive influx of speculators and NFT collectors to the Solana chain simultaneously in the hope of snagging one.

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TPS during the NFT mint - steady and stable

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Despite the obvious stresses, and past experiences, the chain did not stop, halt, slow down at all. The fact that nothing happened whatsoever, is undeniable evidence that the changes being made by the Solana developers are working.

People here love to bag it out for its dodgy performance, but there's a reason I remain very bullish on Solana, despite all the downvotes I cop for it.