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As Solana faces another outage, crypto.news speaks to experts about its impact and what it could mean for the future of the system.
Since its inception, the Solana network has become a leading player in the blockchain scene, promising ultra-fast transactions and low fees. However, behind his meteoric rise lies a series of disruptions that have raised questions about his dominance in the proof-of-stake (PoS) scene.
A historic battle with hours-long blackouts
On September 14, 2021, Solana found one of its first significant outages during the Grape Protocol token offering, resulting in a staggering 17-hour outage. This incident foreshadowed future challenges as resource depletion and halting of blockchain validation crippled trading, staking, and lending projects.
The following year, 2022, proved to be tumultuous for Solana, marked by a series of cuts. From January 6 to 12, the network faced six major outages, primarily due to an increase in computing transactions that compromised network performance.
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The situation intensified on January 21 and 22, 2022, when a prolonged crypto” target=”_blank” rel=””>court Attacks occurred lasting a total of 29 hours, attributed to bots overwhelming the network and hindering consensus.
On April 30, 2022, Solana experienced a two-hour block production shutdown due to consensus stagnation. Just one day later, the blockchain suffered a seven-hour outage caused by an influx of transactions from nft minting robots.
As the year progressed, Solana continued to face challenges, with an extended downtime on June 1, 2022, lasting approximately four and a half hours.
One of the most alarming blackouts occurred on September 30, 2022, when Mainnet Beta stopped working. This extensive downtime was crypto/2022/10/01/solana-back-online-after-latest-outage/” target=”_blank” rel=””>Following for another six-hour outage on October 1, 2022, caused by a misconfigured node.
In 2023, Solana experienced a single major downtime on February 25, lasting 19 hours, due to congestion within its main block propagation protocol, Turbine. Solana spent the rest of the year without major outages.
This year there was another major blackout on February 6, which lasted about five hours. More recently, Solana witnessed congestion issues, causing massive delays in transactions, with some failing. Anza Network revealed plans to address these issues in an April 5 statement.
“Unacceptable for a blockchain”
With Solana facing another setback, crypto.news discussed the potential effect of these disruptions on Solana's dominance with CoinShares analyst Max Shannon.
Shannon clarified that the recent failed transactions were not necessarily outages but rather the result of implementation errors in the network stack responsible for processing blockchain transactions.
He acknowledged Solana's history of outages as one of its main drawbacks, but highlighted the developer community's efforts to address scalability issues. However, Shannon cautioned that these fixes may not fully resolve the issues until later in the year with the release of Firedancer, a scalability solution for the Solana network.
Playnance CTO Roman Levi, in a conversation with crypto.news, had a more critical opinion. Levi expressed concern about the frequency of Solana outages, noting that the network has experienced multiple serious incidents over the past two years.
It drew attention to delays and transaction drops during periods of high network congestion, which affected the user experience. Levi called it “unacceptable for a blockchain that claims to be an industry leader.”
“This creates unpredictability in the operation of the network and raises significant questions about its long-term stability. “Significant resources can be spent building Solana, but it would be frustrating if it all fell apart later.”
Playnance CTO Roman Levi told crypto.news.
ethereum's Dencun Heats Up Competition
Despite its recurring outages, Solana still boasts a massive user base, and its defi total value locked (TVL) has increased by 1,192% from around $500 million last year to the current figure of $6.43 billion , according to data by DefiLlama.
Meanwhile, the ethereum blockchain has continued to push improvements to maintain its dominance. Despite initially being touted as an “ethereum killer,” Solana has not displaced the major smart contract network.
ethereum ethereum” target=”_blank” rel=””>boasts a defined TVL of $59.29 billion, more than nine times greater than Solana's. Now, ethereum is looking to steal Solana's thunder with the launch of Dencun, helping its layer 2 (L2) solutions rival Solana's boast of low fees.
crypto.news reported last month that several ethereum L2 networks saw their fees drop dramatically after implementing blob transactions. This could challenge Solana's offers.
According to Levi, Solana could compete with ethereum thanks to its fast and cheap transactions. However, the network is lagging in addressing scalability and reliability concerns to effectively challenge ethereum's dominance. He added:
“We have seen high transaction fees and longer wait times (on ethereum), but never outages like this. The stable operation of ethereum L1 has laid the foundation for the development of numerous second and third layer solutions.”
However, Shannon believes that Solana still has a chance to compete with ethereum despite its disruptions. According to the CoinShares analyst, Solana brings more than just cheap fees. He emphasized that the blockchain has little fragmentation when it comes to user experience, liquidity and tools, a recurring problem with ethereum L2s.
The Solana meme coin craze: a test of scalability?
Perhaps these outlets attracted the recent meme coin craze that the network has witnessed in recent times, as meme coin developers and advocates flood the chain.
The Solana meme coin ecosystem began to gain traction with the success of Bonk (BONK).
Solana has since welcomed multiple successful meme coin projects, including dogwifhat (WIF), Myro (MYRO), and analoS (ANALOS).
New Solana-based meme coins have raised millions with informal pre-sales on x in a matter of days, and some projects upset their early investors.
However, these few instances of pullpulls have not impacted investor confidence as market participants look to jump on the next successful meme coin project. Shannon believes this avalanche of meme coins and subsequent adoption has been a test of scalability for Solana.
Despite Solana's recent issues with delayed and failed transactions, Shannon says the network has passed this scalability test with flying colors. He noticed:
“The resulting outages were not related to scalability; More code implementation is being worked on in the architecture and execution packages. Additionally, the meme coin trend enhances the exposure of the Solana brand to many more users around the world.”
While Solana continues to attract developers and users with its promising features, as evidenced by the recent meme coin mania, persistent outages and network issues pose significant challenges to the goal of overtaking ethereum as the dominant contract platform. intelligent.
Neither Solana Labs nor the Solana Foundation responded to crypto.news' requests for comment.
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