Solana Network Health Report: 16 Months of Zero Downtime, Developer rise 83%

The Solana network continues to grow, improve, and thrive. This report consolidates the previous two reports and provides an update on the entire network and ecosystem.

The report details the following significant achievements:

• The network health status continues to improve, maintaining normal operation for 16 consecutive months, including during the high network load period in January 2025.

• Release of Frankendancer - a new validator client built by the Firedancer team.

• Set 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 improved, including an increase in block rewards, a significant rise in REV, and 100% of priority fees now belong to validators.

• According to the Nakamoto coefficient, the decentralization level of Solana 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, whether in terms of decentralization, performance, or the robustness of the validator community.

Network Performance

A reliable and fast network is a core element for blockchain to lead the industry.

First, let's review the latest network performance since the last report. Fundamentally, blockchain networks should be fast, reliable, and stable. With the continued development and expansion of Solana, the resilience and capacity of the network have significantly improved.

Solana's performance

Solana network performance is thriving.

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

• The replay time has significantly improved and no longer poses a limitation on the network. The replay time consistently remains below 400 milliseconds, keeping the epoch time stable and close to the expected 48 hours.

• Pinocchio has significantly optimized the computing units, and the CU limit has been raised to 50 million, soon to increase to 60 million.

• In January 2025, during a period of high network activity, Solana broke multiple records, including the highest activity level in blockchain history. Despite some network applications facing challenges during this period, the overall network handled the traffic surge excellently, with no downtime.

• During this high activity period, Solana successfully processed:

  • Continuous days of single-day transactions exceeding 200 million.
  • Wallet downloads have risen to over 400,000 times
  • Liquidity inflow exceeds 200 million USD
  • DEX daily trading volume reached 39 billion USD

High load pressure testing revealed multiple optimization spaces and subsequently reinforced them, such as the new scheduler on Agave/Jito which significantly increased fee processing capacity by 80%.

Application Revenue

The rise in application revenue indicates a thriving ecosystem, with strong funding and economic incentives.

One way to measure the success of a network is the "GDP" of the chain, defined as the fees generated by applications on that chain. Revenue generated by applications exceeding that of its underlying chain is a healthy sign. Additionally, strong application revenue not only promotes the onboarding and retention of developers and applications within the network but also encourages the network itself to continue investing in its infrastructure and developer tools.

( Solana's performance

Solana application revenue has been continuously rising since the third quarter of 2023. The revenue has significantly improved over the past two quarters, with each quarter's application revenue exceeding $1 billion. Solana's application revenue is healthy and leading in the industry.

![Solana June Network Health Report: 16 Consecutive Months of Zero Downtime, Developer Increase of 83%])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-f424772886c5a7cada73816dc5cc942d.webp###

Development Tools

Powerful tools for continuous improvement support the development of secure, user-friendly, and scalable cutting-edge applications.

When developers have quality tools, they can more easily take full advantage of network capabilities. Better tools mean better applications, which in turn unlock new use cases and more users.

( Solana's performance

In the past year, powerful tools have been released in the Solana ecosystem, including Pinocchio, Surfpool, Solana proof services, Token expansion, and blockchain links )blinks### and operations (Actions). These tools make it easier for developers to create programs that fully utilize the capabilities of Solana.

(# Pinocchio

Pinocchio is a zero-dependency library for creating Solana programs in Rust, without relying on the Solana-program crate or any other external dependencies, making the programs more lightweight and reducing potential conflicts.

)# Surfpool

Surfpool is a fast, developer-friendly Solana mainnet simulator that can run on a local machine. It does not require high-performance hardware while maintaining a real testing environment.

Solana Proof Service ### SAS

SAS is a public product program used to associate off-chain data ( such as KYC checks, geographical qualifications, clip membership qualifications, or certification statuses ) with on-chain accounts. These proofs are signed, verifiable, and reusable across applications, without exposing sensitive data on-chain or requiring repeated verification steps.

SAS supports compliance, access control, and programmable trust use cases on Solana, such as proving investor qualification certification, providing verifiable, decentralized reputation for individuals or DAOs, and verifying regions before granting access to token issuance or minting. SAS is supported by Civic, Solana.ID, SOL.ID, Cogni, Trusta Labs, Wecan, Range, Polyflow, Bluprynt, Roam, and other participants in the entire ecosystem.

(# Token expansion

The Token extension will be released in early 2024 and is the next generation of the Solana program library Token standard. With more than a dozen extensions, such as confidential transfers, transfer hooks, and interest-bearing tokens, it offers advanced configurable features. The Token extension provides teams with flexibility and advanced capabilities in their tokens.

Examples of products using tokenized expansion include PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin and the Global Dollar Network's USDG.

)# Blinks

Solana Blinks will be jointly released with Dialect in June 2024, and it is an interface that converts any Solana operation into shareable links rich in metadata. Blinks can be clicked and used on any platform that supports URLs on the internet, including X, Discord, websites, mobile devices, and more. Through Blinks, developers can integrate anything that can be done on Solana into their applications or websites.

Example use cases include using crypto assets to pay for goods, purchasing or trading tokens, playing games, etc.

Developer rise and retention

The developer's drive to create applications and attract users is an important signal of network health.

Developers are the core of value creation on the network; the applications they build attract users, and new users in turn attract more developers. The addition of new developers ### and the retention of existing developers ### are important signals of a healthy network.

( Solana's performance

Solana is the blockchain ecosystem with the most new developers joining in 2024, with over 7,600 new developers and more than 3,200 monthly active developers, a year-on-year rise of 83%. Developers continue to join and thrive on Solana.

![Solana June Network Health Report: 16 Months of Zero Downtime, Developer Increase of 83%])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-9384f4e8df3115ec801f0362ecfc7e0e.webp###

Validator Health

( core client

More different clients can enhance the decentralization of the network and reduce the risk of network failures.

A validator is a computer that runs the Solana validator client, which is the operating system of the Solana network. For any blockchain network, having multiple software clients is crucial for its resilience and decentralization: this helps ensure that there is no single point of failure in the network software.

Having multiple validator clients mitigates the risk posed by a vulnerability or malicious code in a single client, as the presence of other independent clients makes it less likely that the same vulnerability will occur or that they will suffer from malware attacks, thereby reducing the likelihood of a complete network shutdown.

) Solana's performance

The Solana network currently has two main validator client implementations ### Agave and Firedancer ###, with two more actively being developed ( Mithril and Sig ). Although the Agave client is currently run by over 92% of Solana validators, the upcoming Firedancer client is expected to gain significant adoption, thereby making the client distribution more balanced.

The current Solana validator client is as follows:

(# Agave/Jito: accounts for about 92% of the network's staking volume.

Agave is maintained by Anza and is written in Rust. It is a fork of the original Solana validator and was launched in early 2024.

The development work of Agave is actively underway. Recent highlights include:

![Solana June Network Health Report: 16 Months of Zero Downtime, Developer Rise of 83%])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-79818e3c92d6c48899c0caf7bcc3aa84.webp###

(# Firedancer: accounts for about 7% of the network's staking volume

Firedancer is a brand new client, written from scratch in C++, maintained by Jump Crypto. As of April 17, 2025, there are 34 validators using Firedancer), accounting for about 7%###, but this number is expected to rise quickly. The current version, Frankendancer, is a hybrid version of Firedancer and Agave. Firedancer is designed for large-scale parallel processing and comes equipped with a well-designed dashboard and telemetry tools.

(# Other clients

Other clients at different stages of development include Mithril, developed by Overclock and written in Golang, as well as Sig, a reading-optimized client developed by Syndica and written in Zig.

) compared to other public chains

Solana and Ethereum are the only two L1 networks with multiple clients. Ethereum leads in the number of clients, with Nethermind### having a usage rate of 21%### and Geth( having a usage rate of 54%) being the most popular.

Total Number of Validators

The more high-quality validators there are, the better the network resilience, and the lower the risk of network failures.

Blockchains with more validators tend to be more resilient. When users execute contracts on the blockchain, they need to be confident that their transactions will be recorded. Ideally, every addition to the blockchain should be recorded by every validator on that chain, which is why having a large and diverse number of validators is important: a large and diverse group of validators can guard against catastrophic events such as data center failures.

There are two types of validators: consensus nodes and RPC nodes.

Consensus nodes are crucial for the operation of the network, providing two basic functions: ( creating and proposing new blocks to other parts of the network; ) voting on the validity of new blocks proposed by other nodes in the network.

Remote Procedure Call ( RPC ) nodes are the gateways for applications to access the Solana infrastructure. They validate all new blocks and network changes, but do not participate in voting.

This report focuses only on consensus nodes.

( Solana's performance

Since the last validator health report, the total number of consensus nodes has decreased from about 1900 to 1295 as of April 16, 2025. Although the total number has declined, the remaining nodes are often healthy and high-quality. What constitutes a "high-quality" validator is subjective but includes uptime, hardware performance, service levels, and validator community engagement.

The Solana Foundation continues to support and encourage the rise in node quality, not just the number of nodes.

) compared to other public chains

Compared to other Proof of Stake ( PoS ) blockchains, the number of consensus nodes in Solana is still quite high.

![Solana June Network Health Report: 16 consecutive months of zero downtime, developers surged by 83%]###https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-9fa20df0e4d639440bfba758a551acd4.webp(

Voting Rights Nakamoto Coefficient

The higher the Satoshi coefficient in voting rights, the better the degree of decentralization, making it more difficult for malicious actors to disrupt the network.

The Satoshi coefficient in voting rights is defined as the minimum number of nodes that need to be compromised to review a block or prevent network consensus ), thereby preventing some or all new blocks and their transactions from being confirmed ###. For most proof-of-stake networks, this is the number of nodes that require at least 33.4% voting power.

When the staking distribution is highly concentrated, it may only take a few validators to represent 33.4%(.