Solana developers are targeting April 15 to implement a fix for an “implementation bug” that recently caused the transaction failure rate on Solana to skyrocket.
“Solana’s current issue is not a design flaw, it’s an implementation bug,” stressed Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Helius Labs, a blockchain infrastructure firm that provides back-end support exclusively to the Solana network.
“It is important to make this distinction because implementation errors are usually trivial [while] design errors are generally serious and more fundamental,” Mumtaz explained to his 108,000 X followers on April 8.
Data showed that over 75% of non-vote Solana transactions failed on April 4 amid the recent memecoin mania on the network, but that figure has since fallen to 64.8%.
Mumtaz said the issue concerns the way in which Solana developers implemented “QUIC” — a Google-developed data transfer protocol that loops all nodes in on the current state of the network.
But this implementation issue shouldn’t be seen as an overall design flaw, according to Mumtaz, using car design as an example to explain the situation.
All cars have four tires and an engine, but “there are many implementations of the car design,” like BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, F1 and Tesla, he explained.
If one BMW model is poor at steering, then “we don’t say that all cars are flawed” — instead, we say that specific model is broken and needs a fix, he added.
Similarly, Solana’s implementation of QUIC has certain deficiencies and bugs in its current state, Mumtaz explained.
“However, that doesn’t mean ‘Solana’ has a design flaw — it means it chose a buggy implementation for this part of its design.”
In other words, Solana needs to change a tire rather than recreate an entirely new model or network in blockchain terms.
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Mumtaz also shared a comment by Solana researcher Richard Patel, who believes Firedancer’s implementation doesn’t suffer from the same issues:
The fix will take place on April 15, should no additional issues come about in testing, Mumtaz noted.
A reconfiguration of QUIC will likely take place on April 15 before it is replaced with a superior solution at a later date, Mumtaz told Cointelegraph.
Solana’s network failures have prompted community concern, given Solana’s (SOL) token boasts a market cap of $79.9 billion, while an additional $4.6 billion in value is locked on the network, according to DefiLlama.