Solana Network Health Report: 16 Months of Stable Operation and Significant Improvement in Validator Economics

Since the last release of the validator health and network performance report, the Solana network has continued to grow, improve, and thrive. This report consolidates the previous two reports and provides updates on the entire network and ecosystem.

The report highlights include:

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

• Launching Frankendancer - A new validator client built by the Firedancer team.

• Achieved 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 growth in REV, and 100% of priority fees going 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 maintain a leading position 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 of blockchain leading the industry.

With the continuous development and expansion of Solana, the resilience and capacity of the network have significantly improved.

The performance of the Solana network is thriving:

• The network has maintained 100% uptime for 16 consecutive months.

• Playback time has greatly improved, consistently maintaining below 400 milliseconds, with epoch time stabilizing close to the expected 48 hours.

• Pinocchio significantly optimized the computing unit (CU), and the CU limit has been raised to 50 million, which will soon 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 applications facing challenges, the overall network performed excellently in handling the traffic peak without any downtime.

• During high load periods, Solana successfully handled:

  • Continuous days of daily transactions exceeding 200 million.
  • New wallet download exceeds 400,000 times
  • Liquidity inflow exceeds 200 million USD
  • DEX daily trading volume reached 39 billion USD

High-load pressure testing reveals multiple optimization opportunities and subsequently strengthens them, such as the new scheduler on Agave/Jito which significantly increases fee processing capacity by 80%.

Application Revenue

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

Solana application revenue has been continuously growing since the third quarter of 2023. The revenue in the past two quarters has significantly increased compared to previous periods, with each quarter's application revenue exceeding $1 billion. Solana's application revenue is healthy and leads the industry.

Development Tools

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

In the past year, the Solana ecosystem has released powerful tools, including Pinocchio, Surfpool, Solana Proof Service, Token Extension, and blockchain links (blinks) and operations (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, a year-on-year growth of 83%. Developers continue to join and thrive on Solana.

Validator Health

The Solana network currently has two main validator client implementations: (Agave and Firedancer), with two more actively under development: (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.

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 of high quality.

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 with Zero Downtime, Developer Increase of 83%])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-79818e3c92d6c48899c0caf7bcc3aa84.webp(

) Voting Rights Satoshi Coefficient

As of April 16, 2025, the Satoshi coefficient of Solana's voting power is 20, meaning that at least 20 validators need to collude to review the network.

Although the Solana Foundation still hopes to see this number increase over time, the 20 Satoshi coefficient remains robust and leading. The Satoshi coefficient has remained relatively stable over the past 18 months.

![Solana June Network Health Report: 16 Months of Zero Downtime, Developer Surge of 83%]###https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-3ef900d5361b7c164715ff131d48a06d.webp(

) Geographic and Data Center Distribution

Solana validator nodes have achieved a globally decentralized distribution in terms of geographic location and data center providers. However, nodes have begun to cluster in areas with major data centers and the lowest latency, such as Germany, with a concentration of ###.

Validators are active in 40 countries, with Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands leading in both the number of validators and the staking ratio.

( Validator Economic Health Status

The validator's health status is good. Validators now earn income from multiple sources: increased inflation rewards and transaction fees, 100% priority fees )SIMD-0096###, MEV( through Jito) and off-protocol transactions.

The actual economic value ( REV, which is the total of transaction fees and off-protocol tips, has significantly increased compared to the previous report.

Due to the improvement in economic conditions, the breakeven staking amount for validators has decreased from about 50,000 SOL to 16,000 SOL. The commission rate tends towards 0%, while the APY has risen to 7.5%, which further encourages staking.

![Solana June Network Health Report: 16 Consecutive Months of Zero Downtime, Developer Surge of 83%])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-e7f675c573bdd523d1267534c2e53226.webp(

![Solana June Network Health Report: 16 Months of Zero Downtime, Developer Surge of 83%])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-822f58fbfb1bc965ba398381fd0f9532.webp(

) participation

The Solana Foundation has seen several signs of high participation, including:

• SIMD-0094 successfully incentivizes validators to vote faster and more consistently.
• The SIMD-228 vote is the largest in terms of participation and market value in the history of blockchain governance.
• Community-driven validator activities continue to be popular, with the last event attracting hundreds of participants.

Looking to the future

The Solana Foundation is dedicated to improving the health and performance of the network. Future changes to look forward to include:

• Alpenglow consensus algorithm update
• Possible implementation of the confiscation mechanism
• DoubleZero network deployment
• Calculation unit limit increased
• SIMD-123 implements block-level fees shared with delegators
• SIMD-268 increases the nested limit for cross-program invocations.
• Direct mapping implementation
• Continuously monitor the improvement of network speed and reliability

The Solana Foundation is dedicated to improving and supporting the decentralization, adoption, and security of the ecosystem. The Solana network has continued to grow, improve, and thrive over the past year, and we look forward to achieving more in the future.