Solana has gone more than two years without a major mainnet outage, but a new report from Fidelity's Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) identifies concentration weak spots across validators, hosting providers and client software.

The report, titled "The State of Solana: Network Health and Resilience," was written by Mia Galvin and Kevin Kelly and published on October 16, 2026. It credits the network with strong uptime while cautioning a small group of validators, a single hosting provider and two European cities hold an outsized share of the network's stake.

Uptime and capacity gains

The report's headline figure is uptime. According to FCAT, Solana has not experienced a major mainnet outage since February 6, 2024. The network's vote success rate — a measure of how often validators' votes to confirm blocks land — stood at approximately 99.7% in 2026.

Solana has also expanded capacity by shortening its slot times, the brief windows in which validators produce blocks. Shorter slots allow the chain to handle more transactions, a factor that matters as usage grows.

Tokenization and stablecoin growth

Tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) on Solana grew from about $1 billion to $4.4 billion year over year, according to FCAT. RWAs are traditional assets, such as funds or debt, represented as tokens onchain.

Stablecoin activity has grown even faster. The report says Solana processed more than $2 trillion in stablecoin volume in the first quarter of 2026 alone — a metric often read as a gauge of real economic activity flowing through a network.

The report is also notable for who wrote it. Fidelity is one of the largest asset managers in traditional finance, and an assessment of this kind from FCAT puts Solana's infrastructure health in front of readers well beyond the Solana ecosystem itself.

Four concentration concerns

Some basics first: validators are the operators that run the network's software, confirm transactions and produce blocks, and their voting power is weighted by stake — the SOL delegated to them by token holders.

Drawing on third-quarter 2026 data, FCAT reports that about 18 validators together control enough stake to halt finality — the point at which a transaction is settled and cannot be reversed. Halting finality takes one-third of stake. If that bloc went offline or acted together, transactions could stop settling.

Hosting is the second concern. A single hosting provider controls nearly 29% of total stake, according to the report. FCAT notes that this exceeds acceptable limits set by the Solana Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports the network's development.

Geography is the third issue. Roughly 40% of stake sits in Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

Client software makes up the fourth area. About 63% of stake runs Jito-Solana and about 26% runs Harmonic, the report says. FCAT notes that both are linked to the dominant Agave codebase, meaning a flaw in the common underlying code could affect most of the network at once, whatever the client is called. Spreading usage across independent implementations — known as client diversity — is a long-standing resilience goal for proof-of-stake networks.

Why validator counts don't tell the whole story

FCAT's main argument is about method. The authors say network health should be judged by more than the number of validators, and the report recommends watching stake distribution, geographic spread and client diversity together — the point being that a concentration risk in any one of these layers can undermine otherwise strong headline numbers like uptime.

What this means for Solana and its users

FCAT warns that these concentration factors could create systemic risk under heavy transaction load.

The hosting figure may be the easiest metric to track. With one provider near 29% of stake and above the Solana Foundation's own limits, the question is whether stake moves elsewhere — and how quickly.