Solana halts for many hours after a DDoS attack

Solana claims to be “the fastest blockchain in the world”, and its “400 millisecond block times” and low transaction costs have been the main arguments supporting SOL extraordinary price rally of over 400% in under a month, corrected since to “only” 260%.

However, it might be too early to announce the advent of a ”new Ethereum”: Solana is only 2 years old, and it needs to survive numerous stress-tests to prove its reliability.

Yesterday’s DDoS attack, where a Solana-based DeFi protocol Raydium was flooded with as many as 400’000 transactions/sec, cause the network to start forking, which led to excessive memory consumption and caused some nodes to go offline.

Solana’s activity restarted after 11 hours of halt, with its DApps, block explorers and supporting systems expected to resume their activity in several hours.

There’s no universal answer as to the best type of blockchain. Solana is a BFT-based, which enables high scalability, but also makes it vulnerable to DDoS-style attacks, for it costs almost nothing to initiate a transaction. Bitcoin and Ethereum are PoW blockchains with low scalability and high fees, but much more reliable of course. Some other contenders, including Cardano and ETH 2.0, bet on a PoS-based consensus to find a middle ground…

The exiting part is that nothing is written in stone yet, and the technology is developing together with its use cases.