Solana Labs, a blockchain technology company, has recently released a blog post outlining plans to address the balance between reliability and building a scalable and fast network. This comes in light of the issues that arose during last week’s 1.14 network update, which aimed to improve the network’s speed and scalability.
The core engineers of Solana Labs had been working to fix live problems that had been impacting the network’s speed and usability, including invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions, lack of fee markets, spiraling RAM, storage, and restart overhead. The team prioritized addressing these issues to improve the user experience on the network.
The blog post outlines plans to improve the software release process, including bringing in additional external developers and auditors to test and find exploits, and continuing to support external core engineers, such as the Firedancer team building a second validator client.
Core engineers also plan to work with validators to improve the software release process by downgrading testnet to the current mainnet-beta version and feature-set before upgrading it to the release candidate of the new version, observing how the testnet migration goes in real-time, and repeating this process while stress-testing the testnet. This will be followed by a release of the new version to mainnet-beta validators for upgrade.
The team has also formed an adversarial team comprised 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.
Improvements to the restart process are also being made, with nodes being automatically discovering the latest optimistically confirmed slot and sharing the ledger with each other if it is missing.
The team is committed to making these changes to ensure that reliability does not suffer for the sake of innovation and speed. They acknowledge that the community’s input and support is invaluable and helps the network get ever closer to a more decentralized future.
Solana has attracted over 2,000 developers building thousands of programs on the network. The developers were drawn to Solana because it allows them to build things they cannot build anywhere else. However, these developers also need a stable and predictable foundation, and the team is committed to making these changes to provide just that.
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