Network Congestion and Scalability

Recently Solana, Cardano ADA, Polygon chains had network congestion issues. Some other low transaction chains may have similar issue, but not managed as big issue yet because the chains usage is still low.

Solana has had serious reputation damage by several network congestion. Solana Status The congestion was related to the increase in high compute transactions, which is reducing network capacity ti several thousand transactions per second. And currently validators experienced some issues that is due to excessive duplicate transactions. Engineers have just released 1.8.14, which will attempt to mitigate the worst effects of this issue. Now more core improvement are under test on the Solana Testnet by engineers. In 8 - 12 weeks, there will be an update to stabilize recent issues. So, 1~2 months, the price and network may be more stable I guess combining with FTT.

This congestion had made big impact to Solana price as well. On last September, it may be possible to get over $300 without that sort of painful network congestion. One of Solana’s headaches are this chain has lots of users daily on NFT, DeFi fields and Game as well recently. So, even 1~2 hours network issue, many users may have much difficulties to manage all their works. In the past, Ethereum also had serious network down that comes from a new pet-breeding game. Before having that sort of game, Ethereum network had not experienced similar network usage at a time.

And Cardano had more serious issue on network when its new DeFi Sundaeswap launched. Cardano network have not had DeFi yet, just recently it started to launch its early stage immature DeFi. So, Cardano never had experienced that sort of network usage that happened at a time. I think Users, DeFi itself, Cardano network sides all were almost on panic with that. Somebody sent asset, but no record, no delivery and no return. And for some days, all users could not swap at all. But Cardano may get over this issue with their own way. Slowly, but clearly one-by-one. With Solana side view, it seems to be a bit late.

Cardano Sundawswap Launch Network Congestion

Polygon had similar issue, but small number of users knew the reason. One game tried to record all transactions in Polygon network not making its transaction efficiently. So the transaction cost got higher up to over 500x of normal one and network almost stopped for almost 3 days.

Looking at these issues, we crypto side should look at this issue more seriously and make a solution for future general adaptation. We call it scalability issue. In case of Solana, with high speed and low cost, Solana rapidly has become popular chain making its strong NFT field. So it was natural Solana had this sort network congestion issue. If Crypto become more popular near future, over 10 times or 100 times more users try to make transaction in very short time. I think most of chains are not ready, even not experienced yet. Just ETH, Solana have had these issues and experiences. And still they are making their own solution. This is not just a matter of price or competition among chains. This is a matter of blockchain credibility.

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