Solana community awards 100% priority fee to validators $SOL

On May 27, the Solana community voted in favor of giving network validators 100% of the priority fees generated by network users, a vote that passed by a margin of 77%.

Previously, Solana's priority fee was split equally between rewarding Solana's validators and the Solana network's token burning mechanism.

Solana (SOL) has seen significant price increases since late 2023. The token reached a high of around $210 in March 2024 and is currently trading at around $170.

Despite Solana's strong price performance, the network was plagued with congestion issues and a number of system outages leading to the network being down on at least four separate occasions.

The first prominent system outage occurred in September 2021, when bots increased network congestion, causing the Solana network to go down for 17 hours.

Just four months later, in December, Solana crashed again due to unusually high traffic. Later that month, the network again encountered congestion issues due to SolChick's game token sale.

In 2023, Solana experienced another major outage, again due to unusually high network traffic. At the time, Solana's authenticators believed the issue was caused by an upgrade to Solana's authenticator software, although rolling back to a previous version of the software did not resolve the issue.

The validators then rebooted the entire network using the most stable version of the authenticator software, and normal operations returned to the network.