Fidelity flags Solana risks despite two years without outages

Fidelity’s Center for Applied Technology assessed Solana’s network health across resilience, economic security and performance. The report found no reported mainnet outages in the past two years, while identifying concentrations in stake, hosting infrastructure and client software as areas for continued monitoring.

The report linked Solana’s economic security to substantial staking participation and incentives tied to validator performance. It also identified low latency, expanded capacity and low transaction costs as network performance factors.

Stake is concentrated among a limited number of validator identities and operators, according to the report. It also called for monitoring the distribution of hosting providers and client software. A failure involving a major operator, infrastructure provider or software client could expose the network to disruption, the report said.

On Aug. 21, Solana’s slot time was reduced to 350 milliseconds, according to Jacob Creech, the Solana Foundation’s vice president of technology. Slot time is the interval between blocks. The reduction was the first since the network launched.

The Solana Foundation announced plans in June to reduce slot time further to 200 milliseconds. Three additional reductions of 50 milliseconds each are planned. Shorter slot times are intended to reduce latency and speed up transaction confirmations.