- The latest outage on the Solana network lasted approximately 24 hours.
- Community members are expressing concern over the blockchain’s reliability and inherent design.
- The price of SOL has not declined dramatically in the wake of another significant network outage.
Despite implementing a series of upgrades to improve the network, the Solana (SOL) blockchain has suffered numerous prolonged outages.
On February 25th, 2023, the Solana Mainnet Beta suffered its latest performance degradation. The network outage caused transaction interferences resulting in the blockchain’s developer community opting for a network restart.
According to a report published by the Solana Foundation, the cause behind the “significant” degradation of performance remains unknown.
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The latest outage has left the community disgruntled, with some members questioning the network’s reliability and others illuminating flaws in Solana’s inherent design that are believed to have triggered the various outages.
A Flaw in Solana’s Design?
A myriad of commentary is being published in response to the network outage, displaying dissatisfaction toward the Proof-of-History (PoH) blockchain network.
Community member DBCryptoX opines that the recurrence of network outages is a byproduct of a “major design flaw” on the Solana blockchain.
According to the user, the problem is that consensus occurs on-chain with validator communications reflecting as transactions. DBCryptoX further explains that this design “inflates the transaction volume” and transactions per second (TPS), consequently bottlenecking the network.
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This presents a concern when the network suffers an outage, as validators are forced to go off-chain to reach a consensus. If validators are unavailable during the outage, this leads to a significant delay in a network restart.
Furthermore, a tweet by Solana Status addressing the “coordinated restart” on February 26th has amassed close to 200,000 views on Twitter amidst community FUD.
As part of the ongoing conversation, Solana mobile app developer Creativedrewy has stated that Solana chooses “security over liveness.” The comment has prompted a response from business developer Mst Tulip, stating that each outage places decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols on the Solana network “at risk of insolvency.”
Despite the uproar in the community, the price of SOL has shown little influence from the outage and negative sentiment displayed on Crypto Twitter. At the time of writing, SOL is trading at $22.72, recording a 70.50% increase within the last three months.
Ongoing investigations are underway to determine the cause behind the latest network outage on February 25th and why the Solana network was not processing any transactions for approximately 24 hours.
On the Flipside
- Solana’s founders have addressed the network outages, claiming that a compact vote state is being tested on the network, which should result in less data being transmitted on the nodes.
- NFT sales on the Solana network continue to carry the ecosystem after claiming 14% of the total NFT market sales volume.
Why You Should Care
The repeated network outages on Solana result in increased despondency from the community, although this sentiment is not reflected in the price of SOL at the time of writing.
Read more about Solana’s several network outages:
Solana and Proof of History
Many high-volume projects have abandoned Solana; here’s why:
The Great Solana (SOL) Migration: Why is Solana Dropping and Why Are Projects Moving to Other Chains?
