Anatoly Yakovenko, founder and CEO of Solana Labs, has denied claims that Solana’s network outages were due to a high volume of validation messages and its on-chain voting system clogging its consensus layer..
While the Solana Foundation confirmed in a February 27 post that the “root cause” of the recent 20-hour network outage is still unclear, the CEO responded to speculation that Solana’s decision to include on-chain votes as transactions is a “massive design flaw” that has led to his many outages.
The controversial thread claiming that the high volume of validator messages and on-chain votes were clogging the network was posted by Twitter user DBCryptoX on February 27, days after Solana’s 20-hour network outage.
1/Yesterday #Solarium had another 20 hour outage
Just one of about a dozen times the ⛓️ has gone down. But why?
All part of a massive design flaw that I will try to break down in this
So let’s get into it… pic.twitter.com/KmeUPnnlZJ
—DBCryptoX ⚡️ (@DBCrypt0) February 26, 2023
1/Yesterday #Solana had another 20 hour outage. One of the twelve times she ⛓️ has fallen. Because? It’s all part of a massive design flaw that I’m going to try to explain in this thread. So let’s get started… pic.twitter.com/KmeUPnnlZJ
However, In a tweeted response 20 minutes later, Yankovenko called the theory stemming from “sheer ignorance.”.
In summary, explained that the votes – which are part of a “single giant quorum” – contribute to providing an “exceptional level of security and high performance and low fees” simultaneously.
Why are votes transactions? Every thread that I’ve seen that talks about this comes form pure ignorance.
Classic BFT consensus requires quadratic messaging overhead.
The more nodes you have in the same quorum, the part of the network that agrees on the state, the more messages… https://t.co/8lOhICb8mn
— Toly (@aeyakovenko) February 27, 2023
Why are votes transactions? All the threads I’ve seen that talk about this stem from sheer ignorance. Classical BFT consensus requires a quadratic messaging overhead. The more nodes you have in the same quorum, the part of the network that agrees on the state, the more messages there will be… https://t.co/8lOhICb8mn
However, Yakovenko did not exactly refute DBCryptoX’s claim that 90-95% of transactions on Solana comprise these validator messages and on-chain votes, which DBCryptoX said that has helped “bog the system down”.
DBCryptoX also claimed that network outages lasted 20 hours because it takes considerable time for validators to meet and reach a consensus (and therefore a solution) using off-chain means such as a messaging system like Discord.
The commenters on the initial DBCryptoX post also seem to disagree with the theory..
Software engineer Alex Kroeger of the wallet powered by Solana Phantom, said that there is likely no singular cause of network outages and validators of proof-of-stake systems need a lot of network communication to achieve validation.
Although the network was officially restarted late on February 25, it seems that members of the cryptocurrency community are getting tired of Solana’s frequent network outages.
Cointelegraph has reached out to Solana Labs for comment on the situation, but has not heard back at press time.
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