Solana has made significant progress in network health across resilience, economic security, and performance indicators, according to a report by Fidelity's Center for Applied Technology (FCAT), the applied research arm of financial services firm Fidelity.

The layer-1 blockchain has recorded no reported mainnet outages in two years, though concentrations in stake, hosting, and client software could still pose an outage threat, the report said. Uptime is a closely watched metric for any blockchain, because a halt pauses transactions and every application built on the network until service is restored.

According to FCAT, economic security is supported by substantial staking participation and incentive mechanisms that reward validator performance. In proof-of-stake networks, broad staking participation raises the cost for any single actor to gain outsized influence over block production. Low latency, expanded capacity, and inexpensive transactions also support practical use of the network at scale.

Even so, the report noted that several areas surrounding decentralization and resilience warrant continued observation, including stake concentration among a small number of validator identities and operators. Client software carries similar weight: a bug in a widely used validator implementation can affect every node running it at once, which is why client concentration is often flagged as a potential single point of failure.

Network resilience has been a persistent theme for Solana, which has previously experienced outages, including a roughly 17-hour disruption in September 2021 and a multi-hour interruption in February 2024 — a history that frames the significance of the current two-year stability streak.

On the performance side, Cointelegraph reported on Aug. 21 that Solana had reduced its slot time to 350 milliseconds, marking the first such reduction since the inception of the network, according to Jacob Creech, the Solana Foundation's vice president of technology. A slot is the interval in which the network attempts to produce a block, so shorter slots shorten the wait between a transaction's submission and its confirmation.

In June, the Solana Foundation outlined plans to reduce slot times to 200 milliseconds, arguing that the change would improve latency and accelerate confirmations on the blockchain network. Three further 50-millisecond reductions are planned, giving observers concrete performance benchmarks to track alongside the concentration metrics the report flagged for continued observation.