Solana to Improve Network Upgrade Process Following Last Week’s Outage

Solana Labs will be making improvements to its network software upgrade process in order to avoide issues such as the last week’s 1.14 network update, the company said in a blog post on 1 March.

According to the announcement, Solana Labs wishes to streamline the network upgrade process through a six-step plan, which involves the formation of a new adversarial team that will consist of one-third of Solana’s core engineers. The new team will focus on building additional hooks and instrumentation into the validator code in order to help find exploits accross the underlying protocol. Solana Labs’ founder and CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko, wrote in the blog post:

“Delivering a fast, reliable and scalable network in order to move toward a better, decentralized web remains a top priority. 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.”

In order to improve the process for new software releases, Solana Labs plans to bring in additional external developers and auditors to help with testing and finding exploits. Additional ways to improve the network-wide stability include a second validator client that is being built by Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team. Developers from Mango DAO are also building new tools and implementing local fee markets.

On Saturday, the Solana network experienced a noticable slowdown in block production after its most recent 1.14 network upgrade was implemented, which resulted in a near-complete shutdown of activity on Solana. Although validators had to downgrade the software to improve the network’s performance, it remains unclear what exactly was the issue, and an investigation is ongoing.