9h51 ▪ 5 min read ▪ by Evans S.
Summarize this article with:
Solana has not recorded any reported outage of its mainnet for two years. In a study published on October 16, the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology estimates that the network has made significant progress in resilience, economic security, and performance. However, the assessment remains incomplete: staking, validator hosting, and their software remain concentrated among relatively few actors.
In brief
- Solana has not experienced any reported mainnet outages for two years.
- About 18 validators gather more than one third of the staked SOL.
- Fidelity mainly monitors the concentration of staking, hosting, and client software.
Solana gradually wipes out its old outage problem
For a long time, network availability was one of the main arguments used against Solana. The situation has changed. Fidelity notes two consecutive years without any reported mainnet outage. The validators’ vote success rate was about 99.7% in 2026, while the average vote latency hovered around 1.08 slots.
The network is also accelerating. Solana has already reduced its block creation time to 250 milliseconds, after several successive reductions since August. Performance accompanies a much larger financial activity. According to the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology report, the value of real-world tokenized assets using Solana rose from about 1 billion to 4.4 billion dollars in one year.
The network also processed more than 2 trillion dollars in stablecoin volume in the first quarter of 2026. Solana still has capacity. After raising the maximum block size to 100 million compute units at the end of July, Fidelity observed usage between about 30 and 45% during its study period. The blockchain thus runs faster without constantly operating at its limit.
18 validators concentrate one third of the staking
This is where the report becomes much more cautious. About 18 validators are currently enough to gather more than one third of the staked SOL. In Solana’s consensus system, this threshold holds particular importance: if this amount of stake simultaneously stopped participating, block finalization could be interrupted.
This would not allow these validators to steal users’ assets or rewrite already finalized transactions. The concentration remains visible, however. Solana had already lost 68% of its validators in three years, dropping from about 2,500 operators to fewer than 1,000. Fidelity adds another nuance: several validators may belong to the same company. For example, Figment operates several significant identities. Kraken and Coinbase also have multiple validators.
Counting validators therefore does not exactly mean counting independent operators. Physical infrastructure is also concentrated. Nearly 59% of the stake would be hosted in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. Frankfurt and Amsterdam alone would represent about 40%. A hosting provider also concentrates about 29% of the stake, above the 25% target set in the Solana Foundation delegation program.
Fidelity also monitors validator software
The third risk lies in the code. On paper, Solana now uses several client configurations. Diversification is therefore better than a few years ago. But a large part still shares the same software base. Jito variants represent about 63% of the stake in the data studied by Fidelity. Other solutions, like Harmonic, are also largely tied to the Agave code.
A bug present in this common base could thus affect several validator categories at the same time. Firedancer brings a real difference. Developed by Jump Crypto on an independent C++ base, it accounts for about 15% of the stake when its various configurations are combined.
This diversity becomes important as Solana seeks to accommodate more institutional finance. The network recently surpassed 4 billion dollars in tokenized assets, with growing flows toward Treasury bills and tokenized stocks. Fidelity therefore no longer describes Solana as a fragile network. The problem has shifted. Outages have become much rarer. The next step is mainly to prevent a handful of operators, data centers, or software from becoming common points of weakness.
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Evans S.
Fascinated by Bitcoin since 2017, Evariste has continuously researched the subject. While his initial interest was in trading, he now actively seeks to understand all advances centered on cryptocurrencies. As an editor, he strives to consistently deliver high-quality work that reflects the state of the sector as a whole.
DISCLAIMER
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.