Solana developers eye fix for network congestion by mid-April as projects delay launch

Solana's ongoing network congestion has been tied to an implementation bug.

Solana developers are gearing up to resolve the bug causing the network congestion by mid-April.
Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Helius Labs and a vocal supporter of Solana, shared this development on social media platform X, noting that the patch is scheduled for deployment by April 15.

Over the past weeks, Solana has seen a rapid increase in transaction failures. Market observers have attributed these issues to the blockchain’s increased popularity and high network activity due to the proliferation of automated bots trying to seize arbitrage opportunities.
Austin Federa, the head of strategy at Solana, said:

“Solana sees traffic and demand that no other network has ever come close to — it’s a stress test of the whole system. These are exactly the type of stress tests you cannot model in simulation, you have to just see how stuff works in prod and adapt.”

Implementation bug

According to Mumtaz, the ongoing network congestion isn’t a result of a fundamental design flaw but rather an implementation issue, which tends to be more straightforward to rectify. He said:

“It is important to make this distinction because implementation errors are usually trivial (they can be swapped out for other implementations) — but design errors are generally serious and more fundamental.”

The congestion woes stem from Solana’s utilization of the QUIC networking protocol, particularly the “quin implementation of QUIC.”
While the fix is targeted for April 15, additional issues that surface during the process could extend the timeline.
Mumtaz emphasized that besides technical glitches, Solana is grappling with economic factors that are contributing to its current challenges.

Solana projects suffer delays

Mean while, the current issues battling Solana have forced several crypto projects on the network to postpone their launches indefinitely.

Solana staking rewards platform Surge Finance said it was delaying the launch of its native token till further notice until the market “conditions improve enough for transactions to succeed.”

Similarly, real-world asset platform Sky Hause delayed its staking feature launch because of the congestion on Solana. Identity platform myBID also delayed its launch due to these issues.