Network outages remain the biggest challenge for the Solana network, according to its co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
Released in 2020, the Solana network has suffered several network interruptions, which have been caused by different congestions and spamaccording to Yakovenko.
In a September 2 interview with Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal, Yakovenko said that the network outages had been Solana’s “curse”, but added that the outages had occurred due to low-cost network transactions.
“That has been, I guess, our curse, but it’s because the network is so cheap and fast that there are enough users and applications to power it.”
Nevertheless, Although the outages have “prevented users” from using the network, Solana’s CEO said the network itself has not been compromised. He also argued that each blockchain is built differently and has its own “failure case”.
For example, Yakovenko noted that when the Bitcoin network block production stopped for two hours in the past, it was still considered normal.
“[Bitcoin] is designed to be extremely durable […] when a lot of Chinese hash power went out, there were times where there were two hours between blocks in Bitcoin. And that’s totally fine,” he explained, adding that the same production stoppage would be seen as a failure for Solana.
“If there are two hours between blocks in Solana, the network would be dead, because it is designed to make a block every 400 milliseconds.”
Solana was built to be a low-cost, high transaction speed smart contract platform, processing “30 million transactions per day,” making it “more than all other chains combined,” Yakovenko said.
“Once you make a faster network, the failure case is different than something like Bitcoin or Ethereum.”
Nevertheless, Yakovenko argued that the interruptions themselves are not all bad “because all [estos] challenges come because we have users.”
“This is our biggest challenge, which is perhaps the one I like to have…because All these challenges are coming because we have users on the chain every day,” he added.
Solana has suffered at least seven network outages since its launch in 2020, five of them in 2022 alone. One of the longest production cuts lasted up to 17 hours in September 2021.
Yakovenko said that network outages were due to validators not being able to process transaction loads during peak periods:
“I think some people have seen 10 million packets per second being sent to a validator. And if there is a failure in any of those validators where the memory grows very […] quickly, that validator could be removed.”
Notable outages include those caused by a denial-of-service attack caused by bots spamming the Raydium protocol in September 2021, a seven-hour outage caused by bots in a non-fungible token (NFT) application in May of 2022, and a code that stopped the production of blocks on the network in June of this year.
Solana token SOL is currently trading at $32with a rise of 3.83% in the last 24 hours.
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