Was known as the "Ethernet fang killer" Solana (SOL) and double 叒 叕 is down.
On February 25, Solana's mainnet beta unexpectedly stopped processing almost all transactions: transaction processing speeds dropped by nearly 99% in an instant. Solana's transaction bandwidth dropped from 4,300 transactions per second to 42 transactions per second (TPS), according to its website.
A few hours later, the project team attempted the first network reboot, but it failed, and the deep freeze continued, even as the slow processing of transactions turned into an almost complete shutdown of on-chain activity, with blocks stopped and user transactions unable to be processed or verified. After further analysis, the verifier performed a second restart before the backend infrastructure was brought back online and user transactions resumed, more than 24 hours after the problem was initially identified.
According to a newly released report by the Solana Foundation, the reasons behind the "significant" decline in performance are still unknown.
The community asks, Is Solana's design flawed?
Frequent outages of Solana are nothing new. As previously reported, a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on Grape Protocol Initial DEX Product (IDO) caused the platform to go down for more than a dozen hours in September 2021. In January 2022, the Solana deal stalled for 18 hours. In May 2022, Solana's network was invaded by another robot, causing a seven-hour outage. In June 2022, SOL prices tumbled as consensus failure caused by an error led to another outage.
The outage renewed outrage in the crypto community, with some members questioning the reliability of the network.
Paul Brody, head of Ernst & Young's blockchain initiative, blasted: "Solana Blockchain is like an office worker, 'off' at night and on weekends. When are we going to admit that Solana is a joke? How can you [build] critical infrastructure on that basis?"
NFT artist Crypto Tea questioned how Solana blockchain could crack the top 10 with such performance issues. In response to the tweet, Solana Mobile developer Andrew Watson said they chose "security over activity," noting that they're "in it for the long haul." In response to Watson, another community member raised other concerns, saying that each outage puts decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols on Solana's network "at risk of bankruptcy."
Others pointed out flaws in Solana's design. Community member DBCryptoX believes the recurring network outages are a byproduct of a "major design flaw" in Solana's blockchain. He explains that Solana handles all consensus on the chain, which means that all verifier communications are counted as on-chain transactions (TX) with a small percentage of actual transactions (pink in the bar, turquoises are verifier messages/votes, typically 90-95%). Since most of the trading volume consists of verifiers' messages, this "bogs the system down." When a network failure occurs, the verifiers cannot communicate with each other, in which case the verifiers can only use Discord to decide the next step, the problem being that two-thirds of the verifiers have to agree to a consensus for it to happen, and some may already be offline.
Other community members began comparing Solana to Ethereum and Bitcoin. One community member stressed on Twitter that Ethereum takes the slow and steady route, while Solana chooses to move fast, but sometimes fails. Twitter users say that while Solana's approach is riskier, it also paves the way for faster innovation.
Solana's ecological activity remains stable
Despite the negative feedback from the community, SOL's price has not been affected by the negative sentiment on social media. At the time of writing, SOL was trading at $22.72, up 70.50% over the past three months and still one of the best performing crypto assets in 2023.
Solana Eco, on the other hand, continues to be active, with NFT sales on its network accounting for 14% of the total NFT market.
Touted as an "Ethereum killer" by its backers, claiming to offer lower transaction costs and faster processing speeds, Solana supports different types of cryptographic applications, including lending, trading, and NFT tokens. One of its staunchest defenders was Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and former CEO of the FTX exchange. After SBF's arrest and the collapse of FTX and its affiliate Alameda Research, Solana's reputation was damaged and its original token SOL plummeted.
The Solana Foundation has disclosed that it deposited about $1 million in cash or cash equivalents with FTX before filing for bankruptcy. Solana's founders told Bloomberg in December that they have been going to great lengths to sever any ties with Bankman-Fried, FTX or Alameda. At the time of writing, the price of SOL hovered near $22, compared with near record lows of around $10 in January.
At press time, the root cause of the outage was still unknown, and the Solana Foundation said it was conducting an investigation into the cause of the outage and would announce the results soon.