Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says the past year has been bogged down by reliability issues and network outages, but recent updates would help the blockchain address its reliability issues.
At the annual Breakpoint 2022 conference in Lisbon, Portugal on November 5, Yakovenko spoke about the past and future of blockchain, noting that the network has faced challenges in the past year:
“We have had many challenges in the past year, I would say that last year was about reliability. »
In fact, Solana has experienced ten partial or total outages on its network, according to the company’s status reports, with the most significant outages occurring between January 6 and January 12, 2022. During this time, the network suffered during the this time. issues leading to partial outages and degraded performance for 8-18 hours. The latest is what she called “a big break”, which happened on October 1 and lasted almost six and a half hours.
Between the end of May and the beginning of June, Solana suffered from clock drift, i.e. the blockchain time was different from the real time due to a longer than average slot time (known as block time also), ie the time interval during which a validator existed. block can be sent to Solana.
Normally, Solana’s ideal slot time is 400 milliseconds, but Yakovenko said, “Things went bad in June, so the block times went up to a second. Which is very slow for the Solana network”. He said in some cases “confirmation times so we take 15-20 seconds”:
“That’s not the experience we’re trying to deliver and it’s a bad Web2 experience when you’re competing with Google with Facebook with all these other apps. »
Yakovenko said that after a recent update and a doubling of the number of collectors in the past year, Solana is on the way to fixing network performance issues before adding:
” [Nous sommes] in a constant struggle between performance, security, throughput and decentralization, all these issues […] every time you improve one of those three aspects, you can create problems on the other two aspects, but I think we’ve done a great job of solving some of them. »
“Obviously we still have challenges with outages and bugs,” he said, but his August partnership with the Web3 development company Jump Crypto could build Solana’s scalable solution called Firedancer — known as the long-term solution to the network outage problem – the solution to the situation.
Also read: Solana reveals partnership with Google, smartphones “Web3 store at Breakpoint”
“Since we have a second implementation and a second client software built by a different team with a completely separate code base, the likelihood of both having the same type of bug is slim. »
