Austin Federa, director of strategy at the Solana Foundation, discussed the network’s outages, the effect of regulation on other projects, and the introduction of the organization’s mobile device.

Federa claimed that the New York Department of Financial Services, one of the state regulators in charge of issuing licenses to cryptocurrency businesses, was essentially erecting barriers in the way of many projects seeking to launch stablecoins or other blockchain services. In relation to switching to non-custodial wallets, he continued, Solana had heard from projects that were subject to “pretty draconian” regulations in the European Union.

Federa informed on March 1 that Solana had not yet received DFS certification. “We’re attempting to get it rolling, but I suppose that what we’ve observed is a lack of enthusiasm from DFS anywhere. If a new participant, let’s say a sizable Web2-based financial services business, feels the need to begin issuing stablecoins, they believe they must first obtain DFS approval.

Federa claimed that the team’s engineers had not provided “any particular root cause analysis” in reaction to the recent slowdown in block production, which forced the restart of the Solana network. He went on to say that the network’s versions 1.13 and 1.14, or the most recent effort at an upgrade, might have interacted in some way that caused validators to have to restart.

Regarding 1.14

Federa explained that it had been operating on the testnet for several months prior to being moved to maintenance. Since this wasn’t just something that was randomly thrown onto the mainnet, it really sort of emphasized the fact that the testing infrastructure for releases isn’t quite as strong as it needs to be at the moment. Testing simply missed what the mistake was in this case.

In contrast to networks like Ethereum, which took years to build, Federa claimed that Solana’s strategy has been to create an ecosystem more quickly. In addition, he noted that many projects were struggling to raise venture capital due to the current bear market and unfavourable press coverage of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, with security playing a crucial role in user retention.

Solana’s plans for mobile devices were impacted by the collapse of FTX in November 2022. Federa claimed that Solana had briefly removed its “tap to pay” fiat-to-crypto feature without finding a replacement for FTX, the company that had been expected to facilitate transactions, but that it still intended to debut in “the first or second week of April.”

Numerous people on social media have criticized Solana for its network outages, which have been attributed to a variety of factors, such as a denial-of-service assault in 2021, traffic from nonfungible token minting bots in May 2022, and a consensus failure in June 2022. At the time this article was published, the most recent outage’s cause was still undetermined, but Solana Labs founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko claimed that it was not because the network’s on-chain voting mechanism had become congested.