Solana community votes to give validators all priority fees

The Solana community has voted by a significant margin to give 100% of priority fees to network validators.

On May 27, the Solana community voted in favor of giving network validators 100% of priority fees generated by network users; the vote passed by a margin of 77%.

Previously, Solana’s priority fees were split evenly between rewarding Solana’s validators and the Solana network’s token-burning mechanism.

Solana (SOL) has seen a dramatic increase in price since the end of 2023. The token reached a high of roughly $210 in March 2024 and is currently trading at a price of around $171.

Despite Solana’s strong price performance, the network continues to struggle with congestion issues and several crashes that have resulted in the network going down on at least four separate occasions.

The first high-profile crash occurred in September 2021, when bots exacerbated network congestion, causing Solana’s network to go down for 17 hours.

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A mere four months later, in December, Solana crashed again due to unusually high traffic. Later that same month, the network was once again plagued by network congestion issues brought on by SolChick’s game token sale.

In 2023, Solana experienced yet another major network outage, once again induced by unusually high network traffic. At the time, Solana’s validators believed the crash was attributable to an upgrade in Solana’s validator software, though rolling back to a previous version of the software failed to remedy the problem.

The validators then manually restarted the entire network using the most stable version of the validation software, and normal activity resumed on the network.

Following this series of high-profile network crashes, Solana’s developers reassured the community that bug fixes and other overhauls would come to the Solana blockchain but did not rule out the prospect of future crashes.

These network outages seem to come with the territory of high transaction throughput. According to CoinGecko, the Solana blockchain continues to exhibit meteoric transaction per-second metrics, reaching a record high of 1,504 TPS on April 6, 2024.

This makes Solana the fastest blockchain network by far, completely outclassing Ethereum’s current layer-1 speed, as the network attempts to balance reliability with cutting-edge transaction throughput.