Solana is currently grappling with another outage, prompting experts to discuss its implications and potential impact on the network’s future, as reported by crypto.news.
Since its inception, Solana has established itself as a key player in the blockchain industry, offering rapid transactions and minimal fees. However, its rapid growth has been overshadowed by a series of outages that have cast doubt on its dominance in the proof-of-stake (PoS) sector.
The network’s first major disruption occurred on Sept. 14, 2021, during Grape Protocol’s token offering, resulting in a staggering 17-hour outage. This event signaled future challenges as resource depletion and halted blockchain validation halted trading, staking, and lending projects.
Throughout 2022, Solana faced a series of outages, including a six-day stretch from Jan. 6 to 12, attributed to a surge in compute transactions. The situation worsened on Jan. 21 and 22, 2022, with a combined 29-hour outage caused by overwhelming bots hindering network consensus.
Subsequent incidents in April and June 2022, as well as September and October 2022, further highlighted Solana’s struggle with extended downtime and blackouts. The network experienced a major downtime on Feb. 25, 2023, lasting 19 hours due to congestion within its primary block-propagation protocol, Turbine.
Despite these challenges, Solana faced another significant outage on Feb. 6 of this year, lasting around five hours. Recent congestion issues have led to massive transaction delays and failures, prompting Anza Network to announce plans to address these issues.
In a conversation with crypto.news, Max Shannon, an analyst at CoinShares, discussed the impact of these outages on Solana’s dominance. Shannon clarified that recent transaction failures were not necessarily outages but were due to implementation bugs in the networking stack. He acknowledged Solana’s history of outages while highlighting the developer community’s efforts to tackle scalability issues.
However, Roman Levi, CTO of Playnance, expressed more critical views on Solana’s outages, emphasizing the network’s multiple serious incidents over the past two years. Levi highlighted delays and dropped transactions during periods of high network congestion, calling it “unacceptable for a blockchain that aims to be an industry leader.”
Despite its recurring outages, Solana continues to attract a large user base, with its defi total value locked (TVL) soaring from $500 million to $6.43 billion. Meanwhile, Ethereum remains a dominant force in the smart contracts sector, boasting a defi TVL of $59.29 billion, significantly larger than Solana’s.
While Solana’s fast and affordable transactions have garnered attention, Levi believes the network must address scalability and reliability concerns to effectively challenge Ethereum’s dominance. Shannon, on the other hand, remains optimistic about Solana’s competitiveness, emphasizing its user experience, liquidity, and tooling.
The recent surge in meme coin projects on Solana has put the network to the test, attracting developers and users despite ongoing issues. Shannon believes Solana has successfully navigated this scalability test, showcasing its potential for growth and development.
As Solana continues to grapple with outages and network challenges, its goal of surpassing Ethereum as the premier smart contracts platform remains a significant hurdle. Despite requests for comment, Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation have not responded to inquiries from crypto.news.