Blockchain network Solana has been one of the biggest winners of the recent bull run, with its token rising in value by more than 780% over the past year. As the rise in popularity has seen the network experience an influx of traffic more than ever before, ensuring the network's ability to handle it has become a priority.

With this goal in mind, and with the network remaining stable despite the increased load, the Solana team took action. An upcoming core protocol change and guidelines for developers have been posted on social media to ensure "continued high performance" for the Solana ecosystem.

As one of the so-called "Ethereum killers", it is very important for Solana to be able to withstand increasing traffic and congestion. Ethereum has been widely criticized for its inability to handle high traffic, and this story has repeated itself most recently with the ERC-404 craze.

The set of optimizations recommended by the Solana team aims to improve the network's ability to handle increasing usage without sacrificing performance. For example, priority charging will be introduced, the use of software CUs (computing units) and CU budget requests will be optimized.

In turn, the Solana team will make changes to its core protocol, improving the transaction scheduler, which is an important update to the protocol. The scheduler, which will be released in the upcoming v1.18 mainnet release in April, is expected to improve block creation and the order in which transactions are executed.

By the way, Solana is turning four years old. Solana was launched on March 15, 2020, meaning the network turned 4 years old last week. The network currently handles 24-hour trading volumes in excess of US$12 billion, significantly outperforming networks such as Binance Smart Chain, Cardano, and Avalanche. Today, the network currency ranks among the top four by market capitalization, on track to surpass Tether.

Solana's birthday and recent growth are expected to be highlighted at the annual Solana Crossroads conference, which will be held from May 10 to 11, 2024 in Istanbul. More than 3,000 people are expected to attend the two-day event, which will feature approximately 50 speakers from around the world. The list of speakers includes Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, CoinGecko co-founder Bobby Ong, Star Atlas CEO Michael Wagner and Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal.