Solana releases optimistic validator health report ahead of smartphone release – SOL rallies 8%

• The Solana Foundation report shows that the blockchain network has shown strong resilience to validator client disruptions over the last few months.
• The Solana blockchain network consists of more than 3000 consensus and RPC nodes much higher than other PoS networks.

Ethereum Layer-1 competitor Solana has had a roller coaster ride over the past few months, especially after the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX in November 2022. However, the team has been putting up strong efforts to revive itself from the abyss and is back with some healthy growth and development numbers.

The Solana team has recently released its March 2023 Validator Health Report. Interestingly, the report shows that Solana is currently one of the largest proof-of-stake blockchain networks by node count and also one of the most distributed as per the Nakamoto Coefficient. Furthermore, the report shows that the Solana blockchain has also become a lot more resilient, especially at the validator client level.

Solana said that its validator community has shown strong cooperation citing two such incidents in the near past. In November 2022, server provider Hetzner abruptly blocked Solana validators. A total of 1000 validators and 20% of the active stake had gone offline in a matter of hours. However, during the transition to another server provider, the Solana network remained fully online and performant.

Also, the Solana network faced a similar performance degradation last month on February 25. The validator community then successfully restarted the network the other day. While these are some highlights of the Solana network being robust, let’s take look at other areas where the Solana blockchain has done well.

Solana Key Performance Metrics

• The Solana blockchain network consists of more than 3000 consensus and RPC nodes around the world and it has been generally growing since the launch of the mainnet beta since March 2020. In comparison to other Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain platforms, this number is relatively high.
• For a PoS network, validator clients are the operating system. Any bug in the validator client could bring the entire network down with no “backup” software. The Solana blockchain is a multi-validator client network with 2 clients in production and the third in development.
• Over the last 120 days, more than 104 core contributors from several different organizations have committed code to the Solana network Github.
• The Solana Foundation said that its network resilience extends beyond technology “against exogenous factors, including geopolitics, natural disasters, and corporate interests”.
• Thus, it is important that validators remain distributed across geographies so that the network can remain performant through any natural disasters or geopolitical events. The Solana Foundation notes that the network remains well-distributed “with no one country hosting 33.3% of active stake”.
• The Solana Foundation added that they have continued to work on improving the health of the validator networks with efforts like Organizing opportunities for core developer teams to collaborate; Creating new documentation and tools for the validator ecosystem; Hiring a Head of Staking Ecosystem.

SOL, the native cryptocurrency of the Solana blockchain has shown a strong performance and is already up by more than 100% since the beginning of the year 2023. As of press time, SOL is trading at $21.56 and is the tenth-largest crypto with a market cap of $8.2 billion.