Solana has avoided a reported major outage since February 2024, but validator stake and network services remain concentrated enough to pose a risk to transaction finality, Fidelity researchers found.
The Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) said roughly 20 validator identities together crossed the one-third stake threshold in the third quarter of 2026. If they acted together, that share could prevent the network from reaching the two-thirds vote needed to finalize blocks. Validator identities do not necessarily correspond to separate operators.
FCAT put validator vote success at about 99.7% during 2026. The network’s last documented major halt was on Feb. 6, 2024, when block finalization stopped for roughly five hours, according to an outage review by Solana developer Anza.
An October snapshot in FCAT’s report assigned about 29% of stake to one autonomous system number, an identifier for an internet routing system. That exceeded the Solana Foundation’s 25% ASN and hosting-provider eligibility threshold for validators in its delegation program. The threshold governs that program, not the network as a whole.
The concentration mattered during an Aug. 12 routing failure. Solana Compass reported that about 90 validators lost connectivity for 33 minutes, bringing the affected stake within roughly 4.5 percentage points of the one-third threshold that can block finality. The Solana Foundation said blocks kept coming and transactions continued to land. Solana Compass said the affected validators and their stakers lost rewards.
FCAT linked some validator clustering to the network’s latency and hardware demands. IP geolocation placed about 40% of stake in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, though those estimates may not accurately reflect where validator nodes are located. In the third quarter of 2026, 63% of active stake ran Jito configurations, compared with 26% using Harmonic configurations. The report said shared Agave code could expose multiple configurations to a fault in a common component.
The network is also carrying more financial activity. RWA.xyz data cited by FCAT valued tokenized real-world assets on Solana at about $4.4 billion in October, up from roughly $1 billion a year earlier. Raiku’s figures put stablecoin transfer volume above $2 trillion in the first quarter of 2026.
The next scheduled change is the Alpenglow consensus upgrade. The Solana Foundation currently expects its activation epoch to begin Wednesday, Oct. 21. The upgrade targets finality of about 150 milliseconds; that is a goal for the upgraded network, not its current performance.
