Solana congestion continues despite ‘normalcy’ claims – What’s going on?

• Solana’s transaction confirmation time rose to 10–20 seconds as of this writing.
• SOL slipped below $150, following a 7% drop in the last 24 hours.

A prominent member of Solana [SOL] developer ecosystem refuted claims that the network’s congestion issues have been completely sorted and operations were back to normal.

Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Solana-based developer platform Helius, responded to an X (formerly Twitter) post by data analytics platform SolanaFloor, when the latter, citing the lowered transaction confirmation time, stated that Solana’s issues have been “completely resolved.”

“We’ve made some improvements, but by no means are we fully back to normal, and nothing has been completely resolved. Bunch of work left to do.”

What is brewing in Solana?

For the uninitiated, Solana has been grappling with congestion and transaction failures as an explosive surge in meme coin trading tested the network’s capacity to its limits.

According to AMBCrypto’s analysis of a Dune dashboard, 6 out of every 10 transactions on the chain failed on the 24th of April. The situation was worse earlier in the month when the failure rate hit 75%.

Due to mounting criticism, Solana developers started working on fixes to address the issue. A release v1.17.31 was shipped to the mainnet and recommended for general use by validators on the 15th of April.

Further improvements were promised with the v1.18 release.

Meanwhile, transaction confirmation times shot up to 19–20 seconds on Solana, AMBCrypto noticed using Solana explorer data.

A look at sentiment around SOL

The native token of the ecosystem, SOL, slipped below $150, following a 7% drop in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. The dip was likely due to the retracement by bigger coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Realistic or not, here’s SOL’s market cap in BTC’s terms

Solana’s social mentions on top crypto-focused channels surged in the last 24 hours, as per AMBCrypto’s examination of Santiment’s data.

However, the negative commentary exceeded the positive talk around the coin, the negative Weighted Sentiment indicator suggested.

Source: Santiment