Analyst asserts Solana successfully cleared scalability test despite experiencing outages
As Solana encounters another service interruption, crypto.news engages in a conversation with experts to discuss the implications and potential impact on the future of the system.
Solana has emerged as a prominent player in the blockchain industry, offering fast transactions and low fees. However, its rapid rise has been overshadowed by a series of outages that have raised concerns about its dominance in the proof-of-stake (PoS) sector.
The first significant disruption occurred on September 14, 2021, during the token offering of Grape Protocol, resulting in a staggering 17-hour outage. This incident foreshadowed future challenges as resource depletion and halted blockchain validation brought trading, staking, and lending projects to a standstill.
In 2022, Solana faced a tumultuous year marked by multiple outages. From January 6 to 12, the network experienced six major disruptions, primarily due to a surge in compute transactions that compromised network performance.
The situation escalated on January 21 and 22, 2022, with a combined 29-hour outage caused by overwhelming network traffic from bots, hindering consensus.
On April 30, 2022, Solana encountered a two-hour block production halt due to stalled consensus. Just a day later, the blockchain suffered a seven-hour outage caused by a sudden influx of transactions from NFT minting bots.
Throughout the year, Solana continued to face challenges, including an extended downtime on June 1, 2022, lasting approximately four and a half hours.
One of the most alarming outages occurred on September 30, 2022, when the Mainnet Beta ceased operation. This extensive downtime was followed by another six-hour blackout on October 1, 2022, caused by a misconfigured node.
In 2023, Solana experienced a solitary major downtime on February 25, lasting 19 hours, due to congestion within its primary block-propagation protocol, Turbine. However, the rest of the year was relatively outage-free.
This year, Solana faced another significant outage on February 6, lasting around five hours. Most recently, the network witnessed congestion issues, leading to massive transaction delays and failures. Anza Network announced plans to address these issues in an April 5 statement.
With Solana facing yet another setback, crypto.news spoke with Max Shannon, an analyst at CoinShares, to discuss the potential impact of these outages on Solana’s dominance. Shannon clarified that the recent failed transactions were not necessarily outages but rather a result of implementation bugs in the networking stack responsible for processing the blockchain’s transactions.
Shannon acknowledged Solana’s history of outages as a major disadvantage but highlighted the developer community’s efforts to address scalability issues. However, he cautioned that these fixes might not fully resolve the issues until the launch of Firedancer, a scalability solution for the Solana network later this year.
In contrast, Playnance CTO Roman Levi expressed more critical concerns about the frequency of Solana’s outages. He noted that the network has experienced multiple serious incidents over the past two years, including delays and dropped transactions during periods of high network congestion. Levi deemed this “unacceptable for a blockchain that aims to be an industry leader.”
Despite the recurrent outages, Solana still boasts a massive user base, with its defi total value locked (TVL) surging by 1,192% from approximately $500 million last year to the current figure of $6.43 billion, according to DefiLlama data. However, Ethereum remains the dominant smart contracts network, with a defi TVL of $59.29 billion, over nine times larger than Solana’s.
Ethereum continues to push upgrades to maintain its dominance, and the recent release of Dencun aims to rival Solana’s low-fee solutions. Several Ethereum layer-2 networks have witnessed significant fee reductions after implementing blob transactions, challenging Solana’s offerings.
Levi believes that while Solana can compete with Ethereum in terms of fast and cheap transactions, it lags in addressing scalability and reliability concerns. Shannon, on the other hand, believes that Solana still has a chance to compete with Ethereum, emphasizing its user experience, liquidity, and tooling advantages.
Solana’s recent popularity in the meme coin ecosystem has put its scalability to the test. The network has seen the success of meme coins like Bonk, WIF, MYRO, and ANALOS. While some projects have faced rugpulls, investor confidence remains high as they seek the next successful meme coin project. Shannon believes that Solana has passed this scalability test despite its recent transaction issues.
Despite its promising features and growing developer and user base, Solana’s persistent outages and network problems pose significant challenges to its goal of overtaking Ethereum as the dominant smart contracts platform. Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation did not respond to requests for comment from crypto.news.
Read more:
– A comprehensive guide on how to sell Bitcoin
– Ethereum’s Dencun intensifies competition
Follow us on Google News.
