The high-speed smart contract platform has been fully or partially shut down at least seven times in the past 12 months.
According to co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, network outages continue to be the biggest problem on the Solana network.
Launched in 2020, the Solana network has experienced a series of network outages caused by various overloads and spam, Yakovenko said.
In an interview Friday with Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal, Jakovenko said the network disruptions were Solana’s “curse,” but said the disruptions were due to the network’s low-cost transactions.
“That was our curse, I think, but that’s because the network is so cheap and fast that there are enough users and applications running on it.”
However, while the outages “prevented users from using the network,” the Solana co-founder said the network itself was not compromised. He also argued that each blockchain is designed differently and has its own “unfortunate case.”
For example, Yakovenko noted that the production of Bitcoin network blocks stopped for two hours in the past, which was still considered normal.
“[Bitcoin] is designed to be extremely resilient […] when several Chinese hash powers went down, there were times when there were two hours between blocks in bitcoin. And that’s perfectly normal,” he explained, adding that stopping Solana in production the same way would be considered a failure:
“If there are two hours between blocks in Solana, the network is dead because it’s designed to generate a block every 400 milliseconds.”
Solana was created as a fast, low-cost smart contract platform that processes “30 million transactions per day,” which is “more than all other networks combined,” Yakovenko said:
“Once you build a faster network, the failure case is different than something like Bitcoin or Ethereum.”
However, Yakovenko argued that the outages themselves are not that bad “because all these problems arise because we have users”.
“That’s our biggest problem, which I probably like because of all these problems that come up because we have users online on a daily basis,” he added.
Connected: Reliable Unreliable: Solana price falls after the last network outage
Since launching in 2020, Solana has experienced at least seven network outages, including five in 2022 alone. One of the longest production shutdowns lasted up to 17 hours in September 2021.
Yakovenko said the network outages were caused by validators being unable to process transaction loads during peak periods:
“I think some people saw 10Mpps being sent to the validator. And if one of those validators has a bug that causes memory to grow […] very quickly, that validator can go offline.”
Notable bugs included a denial of service attack caused by Raydium protocol spam bots in September 2021, a seven-hour outage caused by bots in a non-fungible token application (NFT) in May 2022 and a code bug that caused this error stopped producing blocks on the network in June of this year.
The Solana token, SOL, is currently worth $32, up 3.83% over the last 24 hours.
