Amidst another blackout for Solana, crypto.news explores the repercussions with industry insiders and ponders over potential implications for the platform’s future.
Starting from its beginning, Solana network has become a major contender in the blockchain industry, known for its quick transactions and affordable fees. Yet, this impressive growth has been accompanied by several outages that have sparked doubts about its position as a top player in the proof-of-stake (PoS) market.
A historical battle with hours-long outages
On September 14, 2021, Solana experienced its initial major disruption during the token sale of Grape Protocol, leading to an extended downtime of approximately 17 hours. This occurrence served as a warning sign for upcoming difficulties, as resource exhaustion and paused blockchain validation caused trading, staking, and lending initiatives to come to a halt.
In the year 2022, Solana experienced significant turbulence. Between January 6th and 12th, the network encountered no less than six major interruptions. The main cause of these disruptions was a sudden increase in compute transactions, which negatively impacted the network’s functionality.
Currently, the Solana Network is facing reduced efficiency due to a surge in complex transactions requiring significant computational power. As a result, the network’s ability to process transactions slows down significantly, limiting its capacity to around thousands per second. Consequently, some users are encountering failed transactions.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) January 6, 2022
On January 21 and 22, 2022, the problem worsened significantly. For nearly three days (a total of 29 hours), the network was hit with an extended blackout. This disruption was caused by bots flooding the system beyond its capacity, making it difficult to reach a consensus.
On the 30th of April, 2022, Solana encountered a two-hour interruption in block production as a result of consensus stalling. The very next day, the blockchain endured a seven-hour downtime due to an overwhelming number of transactions generated by NFT minting bots.
Throughout the year, Solana encountered numerous difficulties, including a prolonged outage on June 1, 2022, which lasted around four hours and thirty minutes.
On September 30, 2022, one of the most disturbing interruptions took place when the Mainnet Beta suddenly stopped working. This prolonged disruption was then compounded by another six-hour outage on October 1, 2022, due to a misconfigured node. [
In the year 2023, there was a single significant disruption to the Solana platform on February 25th that lasted for approximately 19 hours. This interruption occurred due to congestion within its main block-transmission method, Turbine. The remainder of the year saw no major disruptions for Solana.
In February of this year, there was yet another major interruption that lasted approximately five hours. More recently, Solana experienced traffic jams leading to lengthy transaction delays and even some failures. Anza Network announced their intentions to resolve these complications on April 5th.
“Unacceptable for a blockchain”
In light of Solana encountering another obstacle, crypto.news explored the possible implications for its market position with Max Shannon, a CoinShares analyst.
Shannon explained that the recent unsuccessful transactions weren’t solely due to system downtimes, but more likely resulted from programming issues in the network layer managing the blockchain’s transaction processing.
Although Solana’s past record of outages is a significant drawback, the developer community is working diligently to tackle scalability problems. However, Shannon warned that these improvements may not completely eliminate the issues until the rollout of Firedancer later in the year, which is designed to enhance Solana’s network capacity.
In an interview with crypto.news, Playnance CTO Roman Levi voiced his skepticism. He raised concerns about the regularity of Solana’s network interruptions, mentioning that there have been several major disruptions in the last two years.
During times of heavy network traffic, there were issues with delays and failed transactions that negatively impacted users. Levi considered this unacceptable for a blockchain aiming to set industry standards.
The network’s performance becomes erratic and uncertain, bringing up major concerns about its future resilience. Investing substantial efforts in developing for Solana could prove disappointing if the platform ultimately collapses.
Playnance CTO Roman Levi told crypto.news.
Ethereum’s Dencun heats up the competition
Although Solana experiences frequent interruptions, it continues to attract a large number of users. The total value locked in its decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has significantly grown, increasing by 1,192% from approximately $500 million last year to the present value of $6.43 billion, based on DefiLlama’s data.
In the meantime, Ethereum‘s blockchain has kept advancing with upgrades to protect its leading position in the market. Although Solana was once labeled as a potential “Ethereum killer,” it has yet to overtake Ethereum as the go-to platform for smart contracts.
Ethereum currently has a total value locked in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) amounting to $59.29 billion, which is more than nine times larger than Solana’s. To further compete with Solana’s low fees, Ethereum introduces Dencun – a new feature for its Layer-2 (L2) solutions.
Last month, Crypto.news announced that various Ethereum L2 platforms experienced significant fee reductions following the adoption of blob transactions. This development might pose competition for Solana’s services.
Based on Levi’s perspective, Solana has the potential to rival Ethereum due to its swift and affordable transactions. Nevertheless, it needs to tackle issues related to scalability and dependability more efficiently in order to seriously threaten Ethereum’s leadership position. He also mentioned:
On Ethereum, we’ve experienced higher transaction costs and longer delays than usual. However, complete stoppages like this have not occurred before. Ethereum’s mainnet (L1) has consistently functioned, creating a solid base for the emergence of various second and third-layer projects.
Despite the outages, Shannon is optimistic about Solana’s ability to challenge Ethereum. According to his analysis at CoinShares, Solana offers more than just affordable fees. He highlighted that Solana has less fragmentation in terms of user experience, liquidity, and development tools – an ongoing concern with Ethereum L2 solutions.
Solana’s meme coin craze: a scalability test?
Maybe the alluring features of this network are behind the surge in popularity of meme coins lately, with creators and supporters rushing to join the trend.
The Solana meme coin ecosystem started gaining traction with the success of Bonk (BONK).
After that, Solana has seen the launch of several popular meme coins, such as Dogwifhat (WIF), Myro (MYRO), and Analos (ANALOS), which have all been successful.
In recent days, new meme coins built on the Solana platform have successfully raised millions through unofficial presale events on X, attracting a large following. However, some of these projects have unfortunately “rugged” their early investors, meaning they have taken the funds and disappeared with no intention of delivering on their promised returns.
Despite some instances of rug pulls not shaking investor trust, people are still eager to join the next thriving meme coin initiative. Shannon views these numerous meme coins and the resulting trend as a trial by fire for Solana’s ability to handle increased usage.
In spite of Solana encountering some problems with late and unsuccessful transactions lately, Shannon is confident that the network has aced the scalability challenge based on his observation.
“The power outages that occurred were not due to scalability issues; instead, our team is focusing on adding more code and refining the architecture and execution plans. Additionally, the popularity of meme coins is helping to increase Solana’s visibility to a larger international audience.”
Despite the growing interest in Solana due to its alluring attributes, as demonstrated by the trending meme coin craze, the network’s frequent downtimes and technical problems create formidable hurdles for Solana’s ambition of surpassing Ethereum as the leading smart contracts platform.
Neither Solana Labs nor the Solana Foundation responded to crypto.news’ requests for comment.
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2024-04-12 18:06