Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) launched a mainnet beta update, v1.17.31 to handle network congestion that occurred early last week amid soaring meme coin transactions.

What Happened: The Solana Foundation has attributed the network congestion to the high demand for Solana block space and increased network activity. The update, released on April 12, underwent three days of testing before being recommended for general use by mainnet beta validators.

This patch includes enhancements to alleviate network congestion and will be succeeded by further improvements in v1.18. The current version will also address issues related to the open interest jump. Validators are advised to upgrade to the latest patch only when there's less than a 5% delinquent stake, referring to the total stake for offline validators.

Austin Federa, Solana Foundation strategy lead said that that developers had been working tirelessly to fix the issue, but the network demand has outpaced the timely developer intervention, as reported by CoinTelegraph. The first of a series of patches to tackle the ongoing issue was released for developers on April 15.

Also Read: Solana Challenges Ethereum's Lead In Blockchain Payments Race, Report Finds

Why It Matters: The Solana network had been grappling with congestion issues for nearly a week, with a transaction failure rate as high as 75%. The Solana Foundation attributed these problems to various factors, including a large demand for Solana block space and a delayed implementation of patches to tackle network-related issues.

Over the past 24 hours, Solana is trading 2.1% higher, with a 6.4% surge in total value locked to $3.8 billion.

What's Next: The influence of altcoins and Bitcoin as an institutional asset class are topics expected to be thoroughly explored at Benzinga's upcoming Future of Digital Assets event on Nov. 19.

This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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