The ‘key factor’ to Solana’s success in 2023

• Solana network sees a decline in outages thanks in part to priority fees. 
• SOL price experiences fluctuations, with recent gains, but sees a significant decline over the past year.

The Solana network’s nemesis, outages, appeared to have diminished recently, bringing relief. Messari reported that this improvement can be attributed, at least partially, to the implementation of priority fees.

However, how has the network’s uptime status over the past 90 days been, and what is the current state of SOL?

Priority fees help Solana stay up

The Solana blockchain encountered its fair share of outages over time, each leaving a mark on its journey. In September 2021, the network fell victim to a disruptive denial-of-service attack orchestrated by bots spamming Raydium, causing a significant outage. Following that, in May 2022, an invasion of bots struck the network again, resulting in seven hours of downtime.

Furthermore, in June 2022, an outage occurred due to a consensus failure caused by a bug. Then, on February 25, 2023, performance degradation issues arose, causing transaction disruptions. To address this, validators opted for a network restart to restore normalcy

During the first two quarters of 2022, the network encountered challenges from spamming activities associated with Gulfstream, Solana’s alternative to the traditional memepool for pending transactions. 

However, the implementation of priority fees played a crucial role in alleviating these issues by increasing the cost of spamming the network, per a recent Messari report. This significant change reduced Solana’s downtime, which was previously caused by inefficient transaction processing. By the end of Q1, it was observed that more than 50% of daily fees were paid by users who chose to prioritize their transactions. 

Solana’s uptime status and active wallets in the last 90 days

Taking a closer look at the uptime status of Solana over the past 90 days, as reported by the Solana status scanner, it became evident that the network had achieved remarkable stability since its last outage.

As of this writing, key components such as the cluster, RPC nodes, explorer, and Solana.com were all fully operational and had maintained this state for the entire 90-day period.

While the network managed to remain up and running, there has been a noticeable decline in the number of active wallets connected to Solana. As of this writing, the count stood at approximately 325,550 active wallets, indicating a decrease. However, May witnessed the highest number of active wallets in the past three months.

Source: Solana Explorer

The SOL price trend

Over the weekend, Solana [SOL] experienced a positive development in its value, as indicated by the daily timeframe chart. The weekend concluded with an almost 10% increase in value. Closing trading on 28 May at $20.8, SOL witnessed a 1.82% price gain. However, at the time of writing, there was a slight dip in price, and it was trading around $20.69.

Source: TradingView

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Examining CoinMarketCap’s data, SOL had faced a significant decline in value over the past year, losing over 50%. Various factors, including network outages and other market dynamics, have played a role in contributing to this downtrend in price. Looking ahead, the possibility of an uptrend might hinge on the network’s ability to maintain stability.