The goal of the Solana project is to build the world’s fastest network that is open, permissionless and decentralized — but that goal is still far away, admitted Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation. 

“From a user experience perspective, the network is nowhere near where we sort of hope and expect it to be,” Federa told Cointelegraph during an interview on the sidelines of Paris Blockchain Week. 

According to Federa, the congestion that has plagued Solana is a byproduct of its success, which has been driving an unexpectedly high amount of activity to the network.

“The charitable view of this is a failure of success, this huge demand for the Solana block space,” he said, adding that Solana is processing more transactions per second than Ethereum layer 1s and layer 2s combined. 

On the other hand, he admitted that Solana developers should have been able to anticipate the demand spikes affecting the network by implementing the necessary upgrades in time.

“The estimation between what the demand for Solana would be versus when this thing needed to be upgraded and fixed, those things did not line up," Federa explained. 

To know more about Federa’s view on the future of Solana and possible solutions for network congestion, check out the full interview on Cointelegraph’s YouTube channel.