The Solana (SOL) network grew fast in 2021, but in 2022 the cryptocurrency will have a much harder time. This is of course because all races have fallen heavily this year, but Solana is also struggling with a dropout. The blockchain has already failed five times in 2022. Anayoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, calls the failure the biggest stumbling block for the network. In an interview with Raoul Pal of Real Vision, the co-founder even calls it a “curse:”
[Blaze Trends. Solana network outages are a “curse”, founder admits. (Accessed September 5, 2022).
Solana network launched in 2020 has a market cap of $11,122,728,731 and ranks 9th on the crypto assets global list. (Source: Coinmarketcap) The outages of the Solana network is quite evident since the network has seen a huge surge in terms of developers as well as retail users. The network saw a surge of 58% in new SOL wallets. (Source: CoinDesk). With a huge community and new users coming into the ecosystem the network has been facing bandwidth issues and some crypto anarchists have also created scam SOL events according to Yakovenko.
[CoinDCX. Top Crypto News Today: Co-Founder, Yakovenko of Solana Blockchain believes that Outages aren’t Entirely BAD on the Network. (Accessed September 5, 2022)].
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"In a Friday interview with Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal, Yakovenko said the network outages had been Solana’s ‘curse,’ but said the outages have resulted because of the network’s low-cost transactions. 'That’s been, I guess, our curse, but it’s because the network is so cheap and fast that there are enough users and applications that are driving that.” [Lindrea, B. Network outages have been Solana’s ‘curse,’ says co-founder. (Accessed September 5, 2022)].
Yakovenko attempts to put a positive spin on the Solana outages. He maintains that "while the outages have ‘prevented users’ from using the network, the Solana CEO said the network itself hasn’t been compromised. He also argued that each blockchain is built differently and has their own 'failure case.” [24x7Crypto. Solana’s ‘curse’ has been network disruptions. co-founder says. (Accessed September 5, 2022)].
To that end he compares the Solana outages to Bitcoin:
[…] Yakovenko noted that when the Bitcoin network block production halted for two hours in the past, it was still considered normal. ‘[Bitcoin] is designed to be extremely resilient […] when a bunch of Chinese hash power shut down, there were times where there are two hours between blocks in Bitcoin. And that’s totally fine,’ he explained, adding that the same production halt would be seen as a failure for Solana: ‘If there’s two hours between blocks in Solana, the network’s dead because it’s designed to make a block every 400 milliseconds.’
[Lindrea, supra]
He explained this position as follows: "Solana was built to be a high transaction speed, low-cost smart contract platform, which processes ‘30 million transactions per day,’ making it ‘more than all other chains combined,’ said Yakovenko. 'Once you make a faster network, the failure case is different than one on something like Bitcoin or Ethereum.” [24x7Crypto, supra].
He then goes on in an attempt to make lemonade from lemons: "However, Yakovenko argued that the outages themselves aren’t entirely a bad thing ‘because all [of] these challenges are coming because we have users.’ ‘This is our biggest challenge, which is maybe the one that I like to have because of all these challenges that are coming because we have users on the chain on a daily basis,’ he added. [Id].
Yakovenko noted that "the network outages resulted from the validators not being able to process transaction loads at peak periods: 'I think some people have seen 10 million packets per second being submitted to a validator. And if there’s a bug in any one of those validators where memory grows really […] quickly, that validator could shut down.”
Solana has suffered at least seven network outages since its launch in 2020, with five of them coming in 2022 alone. One of the longest production halts lasted up to 17 hours in September 2021. […] Among the most notable outages were caused by a denial-of-service attack caused by bots spamming the Raydium protocol in Sept. 2021, a seven-hour outage caused by bots on a nonfungible token (NFT) application in May 2022, and a code bug halting block production on the network in June this year.
[24x7Crypto, supra]
About Solana. “Solana is a layer 1 blockchain built to make dapps more sustainable. A proof of stake blockchain protocol Solana is unique in its consensus mechanism with PoS being intertwined with proof-of-history (PoH) consensus developed by Anatoly Yakovenko. Solana’s great speed and low costs have attracted small sized firms as well as institutional developers to build on top of the Solana network” [CoinDCX, supra]. Of note, at the time of the writing of this article, (September 5, 2022 @ 13:25 ET), Solana is presently priced at $31.89 up 0.19% over the past 24 hours.
