Earlier today Solana experienced its first outage in almost a year and because Solana is Solana the critics have been quick to come out once again bashing the blockchain and its supporters. A few years ago back when I would say the entire industry was extremely immature this was not the biggest thing in the world but now with how far the industry has come I cannot help but shake my head. During a time when government action and regulatory attacks are going on why is the industry cannibalizing itself?

Solana Bashers

One of the biggest names to come out bashing was Charles Hoskinson and I do not think that anyone should find that surprising. Over the years it seems Hoskinson has fallen more and more into the role or vein that I can only think of as the hater vein. For those of you who did not know while he is a co-founder of Ethereum, he was removed from the role with the Foundation that he once had and did not choose to leave willingly. Due to this, I believe that he has always held a grudge against not only Ethereum but any of the other so-called "Ethereum killers" because he wanted to be the one who did it, not anyone else.

The blockchain he is behind, Cardano or ADA has not lived up to the hype that once surrounded it and I think that coming out swinging against another chain when it has an issue is something Hoskinson thinks will work out for him and bring more people to his blockchain. To me, it has almost the exact opposite effect because ADA has long had the Ethereum issue of delays in rollouts which has affected its standing among blockchains. Solana has somehow managed to navigate the FTX implosion that I honestly thought was going to wipe it out. There is a pretty dedicated community to the blockchain and it has been extremely successful in unique NFT communities and even meme coin crazes. 

Beta or Mainnet?!

One thing that I understand where people are coming from but I also understand Solana's side comes down to the fact that Solana still states they are in Beta. With the release of the first phone and the announcement of a second as well as the efforts Solana's team has put into onboarding new users, some say that this means that they are not in a Beta phase anymore that they have launched their mainnet.

I am on the fence about this idea because even Solana's developers have stated this isn't going to be the last time the network goes down and behind-the-scenes comments that have come out seem to further back that up. As stated on X by Matthew Sigel 

Solana outage, what happened? BPF loader, the “Berkley Packet Filter,” which is the mechanism to deploy upgrade and execute programs on Solana, failed. This seems to relate to a previous SMID (Solana Improvement Proposal) that altered some of the features including the adding a blocker to stop metadata from being used in the BPF because it was no longer needed. This is from upgrade 0093 (https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/pull/35093…) - there was some sort of bug. This bug was noticed on testnet and a fix was created, but not yet implemented due to testing. There is speculation that someone manually triggered this bug. Solana, as a result, went down. 

There was a failure in the mechanism to deploy an upgrade which makes me think about the Dencun testnet launch and subsequent failure. This also sheds light on what developers are thinking behind the scenes which puts security first and foremost before the idea of uptime which is something that should not be overlooked.  

Another big update is on the way as well which I think shows there is a shift between Beta to mainnet going on and that is the launch of Firedancer, a second validator client for the network that would exist separately from the current one that Solana Labs built. Firedancer is a shove in the decentralized director and more or less "releases" the chain from a lot of the current Solana control. Much like how Ethereum has had bumps in the road with launching testnets I would imagine the launch of Firedancer to cause some issues with the network as well because, at the end of the day, this is software and software just has bugs no matter how hard you try and work to address or correct them all. 

Final Thoughts

Keeping the current ethos of development in mind as well as awaiting the release of Firedancer it is understandable to see the team say they are still in Beta. After the deployment of Firedancer and generally continued upgrades, it will be interesting to see if more of the developers start to think of the project as in/on a mainnet instead of a Beta version. For now though with these big changes upcoming and the developers thinking about it in a certain frame of mind, it is understandable to see why they have not dropped the Beta name. 

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