Network outages remain Solana’s biggest challenge, according to co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
Launched in 2020, the Solana network suffered several outages, caused by various congestion and spam events, according to Yakovenko.
In a Sept. 2 interview with Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal, Yakovenko said network outages were Solana’s “curse,” but said the outages were due to the network’s low transaction costs.
“It was our curse, I think, but the fact that the network is so cheap and so fast that there are many users and applications using it, caused this situation. »
However, while the outages “prevented” users from using the network, CEO Solana said the network itself was not at risk. He also argued that every blockchain is built differently and has its own “Achilles heel”.
For example, Yakovenko noted that when Bitcoin network block production stopped for two hours in the past, it was still considered normal.
” [Bitcoin] designed to be extremely resilient […] when a bunch of Chinese hash power stopped, there were times when there were two hours between blocks in bitcoin. And that’s completely normal,” he explained, adding that the same production stop would be considered a failure of Solana.
“If there’s two hours between blocks in Solana, the network is dead because it’s designed to do a block every 400 milliseconds. »
Solana was built to be a low-cost, high-speed smart contract platform that processes “30 million transactions per day,” making it “bigger than all other blockchains combined,” Yakovenko said. …
“When you make a network faster, the failure scenario is different than other networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum.”
On the other hand, Yakovenko argued that the blackouts themselves are not a bad thing “because the whole [ces] challenges arise because we have users. »
“That’s our biggest challenge, and maybe the one I like to have because of all those challenges that come because we have users on the channel on a daily basis,” he said .
Also read: Trusted and untrusted: Solana price drops after latest network outage
Solana has suffered at least seven network outages since its launch in 2020, including five in 2022 alone. One of the longest production shutdowns lasted until 5 pm in September 2021.
According to Yakovenko, network outages lead to aggregators not being able to process transaction loads at peak times:
“I think some people have seen 10 million packets per second going through a validator. And if there is a bug in one of these validations when the memory grows a lot […] quickly, this validator might stop. »
Among the most notable are a denial-of-service attack caused by bots spamming the Raydium protocol in September 2021, another seven bot-caused breaches of a non-fungible token (NFT) application in May. 2022 and a code bug affecting the production of blocks on the network in June 2022.
The Solana token, SOL, is currently valued at $32, up 3.83% in the last 24 hours.
