Solana is facing a severe network congestion crisis, with approximately 70% of non-voting transactions failing, according to data from Dune Analytics. Wallet applications such as Phantom have started displaying warnings to users about potential delays or failures. The Solana-focused development collective, Anza, has announced that it is working around the clock to diagnose and fix the bottlenecks, with patches expected to ship next week.
Root Causes: QUIC Implementation and Agave Client
Anza attributed the congestion to issues with a specific implementation of QUIC, a widely used internet transport protocol, as well as the behavior of its validator client, Agave, when processing a high volume of requests. The team stated that the problem is partly related to transaction conflict handling. They are preparing an update to Agave that includes improvements to its central scheduler, which will route and order incoming transactions to worker threads to minimize conflicts and improve block packing.
Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko commented on the situation: “Dealing with congestion bugs sucks so much more than total liveness failure. The latter is one and done, bug is identified and patched and chain continues. The former has to go through the full release and test pipeline.” He emphasized that the team is working “around the clock” to diagnose bottlenecks and increase network performance.
Community Reaction and Next Steps
Users have expressed frustration over the network's impaired operativity, criticizing Solana's scaling limitations. Last month, the Solana Foundation issued a list of recommendations to help users and app developers cope with these issues. Anza's upcoming Agave client update includes dedicated scheduler improvements, and additional performance enhancements are planned for the coming months.
As of now, the Solana mainnet remains operating with limited functionality, but the development team says significant progress has been made. The patches are currently undergoing internal testing. The market is closely watching whether this fix will finally resolve the persistent congestion problem and restore user confidence.