Synopsis
- Solana’s smart contract platform has experienced partial and full outage 7 times in a span of 12 months.
- The co-founder cites the network’s speed and scalability to be the real culprit for network congestion.
- Yakovenko, the co-founder of Solana, believes that outages are not entirely bad since it indicates that there are users on the network.
Network outages continue to be a hurdle in Solana’s ecosystem according to Solana co-founder, Anatoly Yakovenko.
Solana network launched in 2020 has a market cap of $11,122,728,731 and ranks 9th on the crypto assets global list. (Source: Coinmarketcap) The outages of the Solana network is quite evident since the network has seen a huge surge in terms of developers as well as retail users. The network saw a surge of 58% in new SOL wallets. (Source: CoinDesk)
With a huge community and new users coming into the ecosystem the network has been facing bandwidth issues and some crypto anarchists have also created scam SOL events according to Yakovenko.
In an interview with RealVision, Raoul Pal, co-founder, Solana said, ‘’Network outages had been Solana’s “curse,” but said the outages have resulted because of the network’s low-cost transactions.’’
Ready for a deep dive into the “fastest #blockchain in the world”?@solana CEO & co-founder, @aeyakovenko sat down with @RaoulGMI for a look at everything Solana.
From the rise of Solana-based #NFTs & recent network outages to a preview of their flagship phone and more… pic.twitter.com/L0WVrSQEHg
— Real Vision (@RealVision) September 2, 2022
Positive approach towards Solana downtime
Though Solana’s outages have had its bitter moments, CEO, Solana said that every blockchain has a failure case. He said that the outage did prevent users from using the network but the it hasn’t been compromised.
Yakovenko, cited an example of the Bitcoin network which had once halted for two hours and that was considered normal.
“[Bitcoin] is designed to be extremely resilient […] when a bunch of Chinese hash power shut down, there were times where there are two hours between blocks in Bitcoin. And that’s totally fine,” he explained, adding that the same production halt would be seen as a failure for Solana.
Yakovenko also mentioned that Solana was built as a high-speed smart contract platform that processes 30 million transactions per day. The number of transactions processed by Solana is more than all chains’ transaction numbers combined.
Yakovenko said that these outages aren’t a bad thing because they indicate that the network is getting more users.
Additional Read: Helium Developers propose Migrating to Solana Blockchain
An overview of Solana’s downtime
Solana blockchain suffered 7 outage events out of which 5 happened in 2022. The longest outage happened on September 17,2021 which lasted for 17 hours.
Yakovenko mentioned that these outages were caused due to validators not being able to process transaction loads at peak transaction times.
Wrapping up
Of all the major attacks on Solana, the most notable one was the denial of service attack caused by bots to spam the Raydium protocol in 2021. A 7 hour outage was caused by a bot on an NFT application in May.
About Solana
Solana is a layer 1 blockchain built to make dapps more sustainable. A proof of stake blockchain protocol Solana is unique in its consensus mechanism with PoS being intertwined with proof-of-history (PoH) consensus developed by Anatoly Yakovenko. Solana’s great speed and low costs have attracted small sized firms as well as institutional developers to build on top of the Solana network..
Additional Read: Solana Price Prediction
Source: Cointelegraph