Solana network 'nowhere near where we expect it to be' — Solana Foundation exec

Austin Federa, the head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, addresses concerns around the latest network outages in an exclusive Cointelegraph interview.

The goal of the Solana project—building the world’s fastest network that is open, permissionless and decentralized—is still far away, admits Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation. 

“From a user experience perspective, the network is nowhere near where we sort of hope and expect it to be,” Federa told Cointelegraph during an interview on the sidelines of Paris Blockchain Week. 

According to Federa, the congestions that have plagued Solana are a byproduct of its success, which has been driving an unexpectedly high amount of activity to the network.

“The charitable view of this is a failure of success, this huge demand for the Solana block space,” he said, pointing out that Solana is processing more transactions per second than Ethereum layer-1s and layer-2s combined. 

On the other hand, he admitted, that Solana developers should have been able to anticipate the demand spikes affecting the network by implementing the necessary upgrades in time. 

“The estimation between what the demand for Solana would be versus when this thing needed to be upgraded and fixed, those things did not line up,” Federa explained. 

To know more about Federa’s view on the future of Solana and possible solutions for network congestion, check out the full interview on our YouTube channel