Solana, a leading blockchain platform, has announced plans to address issues around the stability of the network during major updates while maintaining its commitment to deliver a fast, reliable, and scalable network.
The issues around last week’s 1.14 network update – which focused on improvements for speed and scale – made it clear how maintaining stability during these major updates remains a challenge. Despite this, Solana remains focused on delivering a better, decentralized web.
Improving the upgrade process
Solana’s core engineers plan to work with validators to improve the software release process by bringing in additional external developers and auditors to test and find exploits.
They will also continue to support external core engineers, including the Firedancer team building a second validator client. Additionally, the core engineers will work on improving the process for software release rollouts.
Before the mainnet-beta upgrade, the downgrade testnet will be to the current mainnet-beta version and feature-set and then upgraded to the release candidate of the new version. This will allow engineers to observe how the testnet migration goes in real time before upgrading the mainnet-beta validators.
Forming an adversarial team
Solana has formed an adversarial team, consisting of nearly 1/3rd of the Solana Labs core engineering team, to build additional hooks and instrumentation into the validator code to help find exploits across the underlying protocols and provide hardware to run medium to large clusters for adversarial simulation.
Improving the restart process
Solana’s core engineers are also working to improve the restart process. While fully automating the process is difficult, different kinds of failures can be solved with simpler procedures. Nodes should automatically discover the latest optimistically confirmed slot and share the ledger with each other if it is missing.
Solana to continue its focus on stability
Over the last 12 months, Solana Labs and third-party core engineering teams have been working to improve the network, and will continue to do so with a focus on stability.
For instance, a second validator client is being built by Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team, focused on increasing the network’s throughput, efficiency, and resiliency.
Solana is committed to maintaining stability during major updates while continuing to deliver a fast, reliable, and scalable network. The platform’s core engineers are focused on improving the upgrade process, forming an adversarial team, improving the restart process, and continuing to focus on stability.
Despite the challenges, Solana remains focused on delivering a better, decentralized web, and the community’s input and support are invaluable and help the network get ever closer to that goal.
Today, there are more than 2,000 developers building thousands of programs on Solana, and the platform remains committed to providing them with a stable and predictable foundation.
