Status compression is online, reducing the cost of NFT minting by several orders of magnitude.
Recently, the Solana Foundation released the “Solana Network Performance Report.” The report provides a series of metrics related to the network state of Solana and reviews the operational status, performance parameters, and energy usage of the Solana network over the past half year.
In October 2022, Solana released a previous report and solicited feedback from the community regarding it. Regular public releases are also seen as part of their transparency commitment.
According to this report, the network has maintained 100% uptime since February 25th. Since December 2022, the average TPS has remained stable. The maximum TPS has been steadily increasing, with a significant increase in the second half of 2022.
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In addition, Solana has launched several new features, including QUIC TPU, equity-weighted QoS, localized fee markets, and more.
The launch of the new NFT technology structure “status compression” is particularly noteworthy. This feature significantly reduces the cost of NFT minting by several orders of magnitude. Minting 100 million NFTs only requires 50 SOL. While developed for NFTs, status compression can be used for other applications, bringing more use cases to the Solana network.
In April 2023, the Helium network successfully completed its migration to the Solana network, a smooth and seamless process.
The following is the original report translated by Odaily Star Daily.
Summary
The performance of the Solana network has improved in the first half of 2023. Specifically, its condition is measured by parameters such as uptime, voting transaction ratio, block time, and TPS.
Since the last network performance report was released in October 2022, the Solana network has undergone significant improvements, including:
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v1.14 was successfully released on the mainnet. There was a network interruption on February 25th (during the previous software upgrade), and an improvement measure was proposed for this. Since February 25th, the network has experienced 100% uptime.
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Network upgrades were introduced to better handle high traffic. Initiatives such as QUIC TPU, equity-weighted QoS, and localized fee markets were launched. Since the network upgrade, the network has performed well during periods of high pressure (e.g., during the MadLads NFT minting period).
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Status compression was introduced, which is a new method of storing data directly on the chain, reducing costs by several orders of magnitude. It now only takes 50 SOL to mint 100 million NFTs on Solana.
The Solana network continues to be operated by a strong group of independent validators from around the world. It is one of the most decentralized PoS blockchains in the world and one of the most advanced blockchains. Below, we provide some statistical data tracked by the Solana Foundation to measure the decentralization and vitality of the Solana network (data as of July 11, 2023).
(Note: These numbers represent the number of nodes, not independent operators. It cannot be confirmed how many independent validators or RPC operators there are.)
Network Performance Overview
In order for one billion people to be able to take advantage of the Solana network, users need to have confidence in the overall reliability of the network: the ability to access the network continuously, the accuracy of network-related information, transaction speed, and the security of funds and information.
Here are some metrics tracked by the foundation to understand how the network measures up to this goal. For simplicity, we focus on four metrics and allow users to easily track these metrics and their progress over time. We include these metrics and some other metrics on the Dune dashboard, which allows you to easily dig deeper into the data layer and run your own analysis.
Uptime
A continuously reliable network is the foundation of network trust and sustainable growth. One of the most important measures of reliability is network uptime.
We have taken snapshots of the network’s monthly uptime, measured by the percentage of uptime in a given month over the past six months.
Voting Transaction Rate
Voting transactions are necessary for the operation of the network as they create the decentralized consensus on which the blockchain relies. Voting transactions occur when validators vote to confirm one or more proposed blocks. Non-voting transactions are transactions triggered by user behavior on the blockchain. For example, non-voting transactions might represent NFT minting or users transferring tokens from one wallet to another. The network requires a certain number of voting transactions to achieve consensus, but over time, we expect to see a decrease in the proportion of voting transactions to non-voting transactions as network efficiency improves.
Here is the ratio of voting transactions to non-voting transactions over the past six months.
Block Time
Block time measures the speed of individual transactions as it measures the speed at which the network adds more “blocks” to the blockchain. In this chart, we see the average time to generate blocks, the consistency of this metric, and how it changes over time.
The peak at the end of February is related to the network outage on February 25th.
Average and Maximum TPS
TPS accurately reflects the current processing capacity of the network and demonstrates its potential for growth over time. The benchmark is 65,000 transactions per second. Actual TPS will vary due to the different combinations of complex transactions on the network and the demand at any given moment. For example, purchasing NFTs is much more complex than simply moving native tokens between wallets.
Please note that TPS does not reflect network capacity, but rather reflects the demand for transaction volume. In almost all cases, the mainnet test version runs below capacity.
The following chart is a snapshot of real-time network performance. It is divided into average TPS for a given date, as well as maximum TPS, split by date. Since December 2022, the average TPS has remained relatively similar, but there have been some fluctuations related to high network demand. Since January 2022, the maximum TPS has been steadily increasing, with a significant increase in the second half of 2022, which is related to new network upgrades.
Network Highlights Since October 2022 Report
In 2022, the Solana network experienced several slowdowns or interruptions during periods of high activity, such as during large-scale NFT minting. In response, core developers introduced network upgrades, including QUIC, Stake-weighted QoS, and localized fee markets. Since the introduction of these upgrades, the network has performed exceptionally well during periods of high pressure, such as MadLads NFT minting. Developers are also continuing to test and develop other network upgrades and plans, including increasing the maximum transaction size (currently limited to 1232 bytes) and simplifying voting logic to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted and stored.
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QUIC TPU: QUIC is a network protocol designed by Google for fast asynchronous communication with session and traffic control capabilities. QUIC can be used to limit the traffic from any one participant, allowing the network to focus on genuine valid transactions. QUIC has been added to the port that introduces user transactions.
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Stake-weighted QoS: Stake-weighted QoS is used to effectively allocate leader network bandwidth. It does not indiscriminately accept transactions on a first-come, first-served basis, but provides access to transmit information, so nodes with a 0.5% stake will have the right to transmit at least 0.5% of the data packets to the leader. This can improve the resilience of the network by suppressing spam or malicious actors. Stake-weighted QoS has been added to the QUIC TPU port.
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Localized Fee Market: The fee market provides users with a way to add additional fees to their transactions to express urgency compared to other transactions. Priority fees are calculated based on the expected amount of computational resources needed for the transaction. For example, a simple token transfer would require a lower total priority fee than an NFT minting factory that expresses the same level of urgency. This process makes the market more efficient by allowing users to express urgency and prioritize transactions.
Improved Upgrade Process: In response to the network interruption on February 25th, Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, published a blog post proposing a new process for software releases to make the upgrade process more resilient when facing network expansion. This includes involving additional external developers and auditors in the release process to test and identify vulnerabilities, improving the server restart process, emphasizing focus on network stability, and forming a counter-attack team. Some of these proposals have already been implemented, including:
Comprehensive upgrade process on the testnet: In order to simulate the upgrade process, the testnet is first downgraded to a previous software version, and then the software upgrade process that will be launched on the mainnet is simulated. Before this, the testnet was a minor version of the mainnet during the mainnet upgrade.
Optimization of tools for manual restart: For example, the initial design is in place to automate some more mechanical steps (SIMD 0046).
Adversarial testing is being conducted on private clusters and the testnet: These tests are currently running in a temporary manner as core engineers are working on building a more formal testing plan. In this regard, Solana Labs validator reference clients now have adversarial ports, and core lab engineers are adding functionality to configure schemes for building adversarial testing.
Smooth release of version 1.14.17: Version 1.14 was considered officially adopted on May 22, when more than 66.6% of stakers had upgraded to 1.14. This is the first major network upgrade since the interruption on February 25, and it is also the launch of the aforementioned improvement upgrade progress. As of May 30, version 1.14 of the Solana validator client is adopted by 97.4% of the shares on the Solana network.
NFT compression and state compression: NFT compression is now live on the Solana mainnet test version. Compressed NFTs are cheaper to operate than uncompressed NFTs, with a cost reduction of 2400-24000 times. It now only costs 50 SOL to mint 100 million NFTs on Solana. This new NFT technology structure is called “state compression”. State compression unlocks many new use cases and expands the potential impact of blockchain by making NFTs available for sending messages or enhancing customer loyalty programs. State compression is developed for NFTs but can be used for other applications. In short, state compression involves storing some data on the blockchain that would otherwise be stored on each machine.
Smooth Helium migration: In April 2023, the Helium network successfully completed the migration to the Solana network, which was relatively seamless for Helium network participants and did not cause significant disruption to the Solana network. Helium’s migration utilizes state compression to mint NFTs, which is more efficient and cost-effective than other methods.
Other progress of Firedancer: Firedancer, a Solana validator client developed by Jump Crypto, is adding and testing more components.
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QUIC implementation demonstration: Firedancer recently did a demonstration of a high-performance QUIC implementation, which should bring more efficient data transactions.
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Reed-Solomon Erasure Coding release: Turbine is a mechanism in validators that is responsible for distributing “shards” (block fragments) to other validators in the cluster. Reed-Solomon is an error correction coding scheme that helps accurately encode data in these shards and then transmit them to other validators.
Tinydancer: Tinydancer is the first lightweight client on Solana, developed as part of the Solana Foundation’s Grizzlython Hackathon. A lightweight client is a software client that can run locally on simple devices like laptops, connect to full nodes in the network to verify the state of the ledger, and check for invalid state transitions.
Real-time Emissions Monitoring: In April 2023, Solana became the first major smart contract blockchain to measure carbon footprint in real-time. Independent startup TryCarbonara launched www.solanaclimate.com to track the network’s impact.
Network Challenges Since October 2022
Since the last network performance report in October 2022, the Solana network experienced an outage. This event did not result in any loss of user funds.
February 2023 Outage: On February 25th, the mainnet Beta started experiencing prolonged block termination times. Investigation revealed that several services running custom block forwarding software on the network inadvertently transmitted a large amount of data, equivalent to several orders of magnitude larger than regular blocks. The network’s duplicate data elimination logic could not handle this situation, causing the Turbine protocol to be overwhelmed and significantly reducing network performance. After diagnosing the issue, core engineers created enhancements to the duplicate data elimination logic, which have now been implemented starting from Solana Labs’ validator clients v1.13.7 and v1.14.17. This will also be mitigated through long-term Solana protocol design by replacing all UDP-based network protocols with QUIC, which will better enforce constraints in Turbine. Read the full outage report here.
Several proposed network upgrades have been implemented or are being rolled out to address the causes of this outage, particularly QUIC, fee markets, and the implementation of stake-weighted Quality of Service (QoS).
Upcoming Measures
Solana core developers have been working on several new network upgrades aimed at addressing the challenges of large-scale user growth and adoption to strengthen the network.
These Solana Improvement Documentation (SIMD) are proposed design documents on how to make changes to the network, which require coordination across multiple core development teams. One recently accepted SIMD is SIMD-33: Timely Voting Incentives, which grants scoring based on the number of votes cast and rewards more for low-latency voting. This is aimed at reducing block finalization time and discouraging intentional voting delays.
The latest release contains several network upgrades, but these features are not yet activated. The new features can greatly improve network latency. The new version also allows users to undelegate staked nodes on the network, reducing skip rate and improving performance. (Note: Undelegated staked accounts are still controlled by the original staker and can be freely re-delegated to active validators or withdraw their funds).
Users can continue to monitor the performance of the Solana network and contribute to the community’s tracking of its development over time through Solana Network Reports.
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