The infrastructure suppliers powering right this moment’s web, cloud, and monetary methods earned our belief by way of years of transparency, studying moments, and constructing in public. Solana has needed to earn belief in the identical manner.
Since launching in 2020, the community has been examined by outages within the early days, sudden demand, and a number of the most intense durations of exercise the crypto trade has seen. Every take a look at has taught us one thing, and every time, the community has come again stronger, incomes Solana its place as a resilient, battle-tested community.
The latest proof level got here on August 12, 2026, when a routing failure with Solana’s largest infrastructure supplier knocked practically 29% of the community’s stake offline. Regardless of this problem, blocks saved being produced and transactions continued to land. Customers probably by no means seen. A full restoration of the infra supplier occurred in simply over half-hour.
It doesn’t imply the incident was insignificant, however that the community had sufficient redundancy to soak up the infrastructure failure with out stopping.
When AWS’s us-east-1 area failed final October, a lot of the web shut down for the higher a part of a day. However when Solana’s largest infrastructure supplier skilled a routing failure, the underlying community continued to run: regular, dependable, and resilient.
I consider this resiliency is just not an accident. It’s the results of years of being trustworthy about our failures, fast to repair them, and targeted at all times on making Solana probably the most dependable chain it may be.
Solana is battle-tested, not fortunate
Like practically all vital infrastructure, Solana has been repeatedly, and publicly, examined beneath stress.
The distinction with Solana is how we react. We, and our builders, deal with difficult moments as alternatives to make the community stronger. We publish public disclosures and diagnoses, and ship fixes that transcend patching the instant drawback to forestall the identical form of drawback from occurring once more.
For instance, early within the community’s life, bot-driven transactions uncovered challenges in how validators dealt with incoming visitors. To enhance the transaction ingestion, we elevated validator connection capability and launched stake-weighted high quality of service (SWQoS) to raised handle visitors.
A unique lesson got here from the transaction scheduler, which rewarded sending the identical transaction many occasions. The reply was a ground-up redesign that made duplicates pointless.
Which brings us again to the latest routing failure. Final 12 months, our workforce noticed that TeraSwitch hosted 38% of the community’s stake. That focus represented a threat, so we labored proactively to deliver it down beneath 30%. On account of this preemptive work, when the August 12 routing failure occurred, the community itself continued on. Even DevNet, which misplaced roughly three-quarters of its stake in the identical occasion, recovered by itself, with no coordinated restart wanted. The community was capable of self-heal.
For my part, that is the prime instance of a resilient, decentralized community performing as it’s meant. Whereas we can not at all times keep away from failures, we will design the system in order that one part failing would not deliver all the pieces else down with it. On high of this, the entire options that we’ve carried out alongside the best way from manufacturing classes have made Solana’s resilience what it’s right this moment.
Solana uptime: two and a half years at 100%
Establishments take into consideration reliability in nines. 4 nines (99.99%) means about 53 minutes of downtime a 12 months. 5 nines means about 5 minutes of downtime.
AWS, the world’s largest cloud supplier, provides credit in the event that they drop beneath 4 nines (99.99%). And so they do drop beneath that commonplace—AWS us-east-1 had roughly 15 hours of main disruption during the last two years, or about 99.91%.
GitHub, the vital infrastructure for a lot of the world’s software program groups, commits to a few nines (99.9%). This implies they account for 9 hours of downtime every year.
However since February 2024, Solana has run at 100% uptime. All whereas carrying extra each day transactions than all different main blockchains mixed, and processing file breaking single-day volumes. Reliability turns into extra significant as utilization will increase. A community carrying little exercise can look dependable, however a community dealing with thousands and thousands of transactions per second, billions of {dollars} in belongings, and actual monetary exercise has to show it beneath load.
Solana has completed this, giving monetary establishments and enterprises the arrogance they should construct on the community.
Confidence compounds
Resilience is not nearly surviving the worst days. It’s additionally about making ambition for the longer term doable. As a result of the community has confirmed itself, Solana engineers can now aggressively deal with pushing new enhancements.
Slot occasions have been minimize to 300 ms (with 200ms focused subsequent). Storage prices (lease) have been diminished by 90%. Bigger transactions are actually supported that allow bigger proofs and higher privateness. Alpenglow, which is on monitor for mainnet launch later this 12 months, will deliver finality right down to 150 ms. And lately, simply after the TeraSwitch incident, the community noticed its first-ever 5,000 sustained person transactions per second (TPS).
In less complicated phrases, now we have been capable of make the community sooner, cheaper, and extra environment friendly. Builders can solely deal with these sorts of enhancements on a community that they’ll belief.
Solana’s resilience is not simply within the community. It’s additionally constructed into our tradition.
By the years, Solana builders have ignored the ups and downs and the noise, and targeted on transport. They’ve constructed—they usually proceed to construct—the rails that $17.5 billion in stablecoins, over $4 billion in real-world belongings, and a rising wave of remittances now depend on.
That tradition additionally means regularly elevating the bar. Earlier this 12 months, Solana Basis and Uneven Analysis launched STRIDE, a complete safety program for Solana DeFi that gives impartial safety evaluations, public findings, in addition to ongoing OPSEC and risk monitoring for qualifying protocols. It’s one other instance of the ecosystem taking classes from real-world challenges and turning them into stronger practices for everybody.
Solana is the battle-tested community
A community that has by no means seen points is a community that has by no means been confirmed.
Solana has been counted out greater than as soon as, however regardless of that, the ecosystem has continued to construct and enhance.
For our customers—builders, founders, merchants, and enterprises akin to Western Union, Franklin Templeton, MoneyGram, SoFi, BlackRock, and lots of others—this dedication has resulted in a sequence that has confirmed its dedication and resilience. Solana has grow to be the quickest, most-used, and highest-revenue producing blockchain. We’re on monitor to be the monetary infrastructure for the 5.5 billion customers of the web – powering the Token Supercycle that’s underway.
We all know the subsequent stress take a look at will come. However when it does, we’ll do what we’ve at all times completed: publish the analysis, ship the repair, and carry on constructing, stronger.
This text by Jacob Creech, VP of Expertise, Solana Basis initially ran in TheStreet.
