Solana halts due to high transaction load. Again.
Are Solana ’s outages becoming a running gig?
3 days after its creator Anatoly Yakovenko said that “if Bitcoin eventually doesn’t switch to Proof-of-Stake, nobody is going to use it”, Solana crashed. Again ?
The recent outage adds to Solana’s already long track record:
🔸halting for 17 hours in September (DDoS attack)
🔸clogged in December (DDoS attack)
🔸congested in January (“runtime issues”)
🔸halting for 7 hours this Saturday (“enormous amount of inbound transactions”)
Solana is conceived as a highly scalable blockchain with a theoretic capacity of 65K transaction per second. However, this Saturday it lost consensus for 7 hours after being flooded with over 4M transactions per second.
One can say that it is a good thing that the blockchain gets challenged with such stress tests, and that its engineer team will be able to learn on its mistakes.
We do hope it will, but in the meantime we can state that most of Solana’s outages come from transaction overload that the blockchain still cannot handle. And with an average transaction fee of only 0.000005 SOL, malicious actors can launch DDoS attacks as they please.
Blockchains need developers to build DApps on them and customers to use them, which means that there’s a great deal of marketing and hype involved. However, if such thing as an ideal blockchain could ever exist, it has not yet been unveiled, and any otherwise claims are mere publicity stunts.
In the meantime, it would be wise for the representatives of the aspiring ones to refrain from smearing Bitcoin, which has been steadily producing its blocks every 10 minutes since 2009 ?
