Jacob Creech, head of development at Solana, reminds the broader community that the team will reward anyone with $400,000 in SOL, the platform’s native currency, if they “shut down” or stop the high-performance network. Taking X on October 13, Creech motivated Interested white hackers and coders head to your repository and begin penetration testing.
Solana Bug Bounty Program
The executive also bound Solana’s GitHub, where interested programmers could learn more about the bug bounty program. The Solana bounty program rewards target attacks with different amounts depending on the severity of the vulnerability. Those who manage to stop the blockchain consensus will receive $400,000 in locked SOL for one year.
Solana is a highly scalable network and one of the main competitors to ethereum. Through its architecture, it can process more transactions than legacy chains, including bitcoin (btc) or ethereum (eth), which can handle 7 and 15 transactions per second (TPS), respectively, when operating optimally.
Solana remains popular and its developers have gradually improved the platform, making it more efficient and reliable. However, although Solana is a high performer, there have been multiple occasions where its reliability has been questioned.
Public ledgers like Solana should maintain a high level of reliability, close to 100%, due to the distribution of their validator nodes. These nodes are supposed to stay online, ensuring that every published transaction is confirmed valid and added to a block. This, on some occasions, has not been the case with Solana.
Will the Firedancer client make the network more reliable?
Since its launch, the smart contract platform has been stopped more than five times on various dates in 2022. show that in the first half of 2022 alone, the blockchain stopped working for 11.5 hours. The bug was primarily related to node updates, which were resolved moments after the effect of the bug brought the network to a halt.
The developers also noted that Solana stopped for no apparent reason, as recorded in April and September 2022. The last network outage was in late February 2023 when, due to a validator node update, some validators were unable to confirm blockages, forcing the network to go offline.
Since the last outage in February 2023, Solana has remained online despite a notable increase in non-fungible token (nft) activity in Q2 2023. Typically, an increase in network requests can cause network interruptions. Analysts attribute the downtime to a lack of alternatives for customers. This will change once Solana releases Jump crypto‘s Firedancer client in an update scheduled for the second half of Q4 2023. Firedancer will be the second validator client.
Specifically, Firedancer aims to improve network performance, especially scalability and reliability, while making the platform more decentralized. The developers say that the Firedancer client will be more robust, meaning it will be less susceptible to errors and interruptions.
Featured image from Canva, TradingView chart
