Solana Status announced on social media X (formerly known as Twitter) that on August 23, Solana Labs' core contributors requested that volunteers upgrade their mainnet beta nodes to v1.16.9, with the goal of obtaining 10% of the stake running v1.16. This is the standard process for upgrading the mainnet test version. Starting with a small group of volunteers helps to discover any remaining issues that have not been found on the test network. As of now, about 280 out of 2850 nodes are running v1.16, accounting for approximately 10%.

Some of these nodes have encountered issues, and node operators and core contributors are investigating these issues. As part of the planned testing process, this version will not move on to the next stage until the issues have been thoroughly investigated and resolved. The phased upgrade is designed to detect issues before most clusters are upgraded and is the result of the system working as expected.