Fidelity’s Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) has published “The State of Solana: Network Health and Resilience” (16 October 2026), by Mia Galvin and Kevin Kelly. The page’s headline takeaway is that Solana has made “substantial progress across resilience, economic security, and performance,” while “decentralization and concentration risks remain important areas to monitor.”
The page’s own disclaimer is blunt: “The opinions provided are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Fidelity Investments or its affiliates.” Treat every figure below as FCAT authors’ research framing, not as a Fidelity Investments investment recommendation.
Cointelegraph summarised the same report on 17 October 2026; the quotes and numbers in this article are taken from the FCAT primary page, not from secondary paraphrases of an unopened PDF.
What FCAT says improved
On uptime and capacity, the authors write:
Solana has now operated for more than two years without a major mainnet outage, while maintaining roughly 99.7% vote success and continuing to expand network capacity through shorter slot times and larger blocks.
They add: “Alpenglow and emerging software clients aim to further improve reliability, scalability, and settlement performance.” That sits alongside TSN’s earlier coverage of Solana’s Alpenglow mainnet target and slot-time upgrades.
On real-world usage, FCAT says tokenised real-world assets using Solana as a distributed asset layer “have grown from roughly $1 billion to $4.4 billion in one year,” while the network processed “more than $2 trillion in stablecoin volume during Q1 2026 alone.” Institutional settlement context on Solana includes TSN’s earlier note on Solana DvP atomic settlement.
Key takeaways on the page also stress that “Solana’s real-world usage is growing rapidly, driven largely by stablecoins, real world assets (RWAs), and institutional participation,” and that the network “continues to evolve, supported by a vast developer ecosystem and active on-chain participants.”
Concentration and resilience caveats (from the same page)
FCAT does not present the uptime streak as the whole story. The same key-takeaways block that praises progress ends with the concentration warning above. Elsewhere the authors write:
Network health is about more than validator counts: stake concentration, infrastructure dependencies, software diversity, and geographic distribution all influence how the network responds to failures, disruptions, and growing demand.
They also flag that “validator economics, staking dynamics, governance reforms, and evolving block-building markets influence who operates the network and how power is distributed,” and that these incentives “will play an increasingly important role as Solana continues to mature.”
That is the concentration-risk frame TSN is using: FCAT’s own qualitative checklist (stake, infra, clients, geography, economics). We are not importing secondary write-ups’ PDF-only numbers (for example alleged validator-count or city-level stake shares) that Research did not verify against the downloadable report.
How to read the institutional angle
The lede frames the report as arriving “as new assets and institutional capital flow onto Solana,” with the network’s infrastructure facing “its biggest test to date.” That is FCAT’s narrative setup — growth metrics giving way to foundation strength — not an independent audit of Solana’s consensus or hosting stack.
Digital-assets disclaimer language on the page also states that digital assets are speculative and volatile, that the material is informational only, and that mentioning third parties is not a Fidelity endorsement. Combined with the authors-not-Fidelity line, this is a research/trends note from FCAT staff, not a product prospectus.
What’s still unknown
- Detailed stake, ASN, client-share and geography tables that live only in the downloadable PDF (not verified for this post)
- How FCAT defines “major mainnet outage” for the two-year claim
- Whether the ~99.7% vote-success figure will be restated with a measurement window in a later Fidelity publication
What this means
FCAT’s public summary credits Solana with more than two years without a major mainnet outage, roughly 99.7% vote success, and large RWA/stablecoin flows — and, in the same breath, says decentralization and concentration risks still need watching. Quote the progress and the caveats together, and remember the views are the authors’, not necessarily Fidelity Investments’.
Sources
- [1] Fidelity Center for Applied Technology: The State of Solana: Network Health and Resilience, Mia Galvin & Kevin Kelly, 16 October 2026
- [2] Cointelegraph: Solana shows resilience, but some areas need continued observation, Fidelity says, 17 October 2026
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