DEVELOPMENT

Solana undergoes three network upgrades! Enhancing network stability, staking weight, and enabling optional transaction fees.

2022/6/29

Over the past few months, Solana has been criticized by the community for frequent outages due to transaction congestion, leading to not only a loss of confidence among users but also affecting the coin price. On the 29th, the Solana team released a technical update article outlining three measures to address network stability and improve the current transaction issues.

This translation and summary cover the Solana network update. For any uncertainties, please refer to the original article.

Table of Contents

Solana Three Technical Upgrades

1. Quic

Solana currently uses a custom protocol based on the UDP User Datagram Protocol to pass transaction messages between RPC nodes and hosts. However, UDP lacks connections, flow control, and acknowledgment of receipt, making it unable to prevent or mitigate abuse.

To control network traffic, the assistance of Quic is needed.

Quic is a protocol developed by Google that is designed to asynchronously communicate as fast as UDP but with the conversational and flow control features of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Once adopted, there will be more options available for adjusting and optimizing data retrieval. Once Quic is adopted on the mainnet, UDP will be disabled.

Current Status: Testing is ongoing on the testnet, and the mainnet beta version is expected to be released soon.

2. Stake-weighted QoS

The Solana network bandwidth has a fixed capacity, and to use it effectively, stake-weighted prioritization must be implemented to end the current practice of accepting transactions arbitrarily in a first-come-first-served manner.

As Solana is a PoS network, extending the utility of stake-weighted prioritization to the quality of service for transactions is a natural choice. In this mode, a node with a 0.5% stake will have the right to transmit at least 0.5% of the data packets to the host. The rest of the network and any combination of remaining stakes will not be able to fully clear them.

Currently, stake-weighted QoS is being developed in parallel with QUIC.

Current Status: Development is ongoing.

3. Fee Market

As mentioned above, transactions on Solana are primarily processed in a first-come-first-served manner, where users cannot express the urgency of executing their transactions.

To address this issue, the computation budget program has introduced new instructions where users can set an "additional fee" to be charged for executing transactions, which will serve as the transaction's "execution priority weight" based on the requested computational unit ratio.

The fee market will be implemented after QUIC is fully adopted and UDP is disabled.