Solana Network Health Report: 16 Consecutive Months Without Downtime, Developer Count Surge by 83%

The Solana network has continued to develop, improve, and thrive over the past year. This report summarizes the latest situation of the entire network and ecosystem.

Key highlights include:

• The network has maintained 100% uptime for 16 consecutive months and is still ongoing.

• Launched a new validator client called Frankendancer built by the Firedancer team.

• Set a record for the highest voting participation rate in blockchain history, with nearly 75% of staked SOL participating in the SIMD-228 vote.

• The economic situation of validators has significantly improved, including an increase in block rewards, a substantial growth in REV, and all priority fees now belong to validators.

• According to the Nakamoto coefficient, Solana's level of decentralization remains stable and is at the forefront of the industry.

Although network improvements are an ongoing goal, Solana continues to lead in network performance and validator health in terms of decentralization, performance, and the robustness of the validator community.

Network Performance

Solana network performs excellently:

• Has maintained 100% uptime for 16 consecutive months.

• Playback time has significantly improved, consistently staying below 400 milliseconds.

• The calculation unit ( CU ) limit has been raised to 50 million and will soon increase to 60 million.

• During the high network activity in January 2025, Solana set multiple records:

  • Continuous days of daily transactions exceeding 200 million.
  • New wallet downloads exceed 400,000 times
  • Liquidity inflow exceeds 200 million USD

• DEX daily trading volume reached 39 billion USD

Application Revenue

Solana application revenue has continued to grow since the third quarter of 2023. The application revenue in the past two quarters has exceeded $1 billion, leading the industry.

Development Tools

In the past year, the Solana ecosystem has launched several powerful tools, including Pinocchio, Surfpool, Solana proof services, Token extensions, as well as blinks and Actions. These tools make it easier for developers to create programs that fully leverage the capabilities of Solana.

Developer Growth and Retention

Solana is the blockchain ecosystem with the most new developers joining in 2024, with over 7,600 new developers and over 3,200 monthly active developers, an increase of 83% year-on-year.

Validator Health

Solana currently has two major validator clients ( Agave and Firedancer ), and two that are actively under development ( Mithril and Sig ). The Agave client is currently run by over 92% of validators, but Firedancer is expected to gain significant adoption.

The total number of consensus nodes has decreased from about 1900 to 1295, but the remaining nodes are often healthier and of higher quality.

The voting power of the Satoshi coefficient is 20, which means that at least 20 validators must collude to audit the network. This number has remained relatively stable over the past 18 months.

Validator nodes are globally distributed in terms of geographical location and data center providers, active in 40 countries.

The validator economy is in good health, with the breakeven staking amount reduced from approximately 50,000 SOL to 16,000 SOL. The APY has risen to 7.5%, further encouraging staking.

Looking Ahead

The Solana Foundation will continue to focus on improving network health and performance. Expected changes in the future include:

• Alpenglow consensus algorithm update
• Possible implementation of confiscation mechanism
• Deployment of the DoubleZero network
• Further enhancement of computing unit limits
• New block reward distribution plan
• Increase in nested cross-program invocation limits
• Implementation of direct mapping technology

Overall, the Solana network has continued to grow, improve, and thrive over the past year, and is expected to achieve more accomplishments in the future.