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Solana faced yet another instance of a network outage as the blockchain went down for a full 48 hours.
Solana giving the doubters more fuel
Solana has had a stellar 2021 in terms of price action, setting all-time high after all-time high and doing an incredible 100x on its valuation. However, the network could never really shake off the naysayers that criticised it for its lack of decentralisation and potential pitfalls that come with it.
As it turns out, these naysayers may have been right all along.
Recently, the Solana network suffered yet another outage, which has been a repeated issue for the promising blockchain, with validators having to restart the network on several occasions. With this outage being the second in January, it was also the worst one thus far, leading to the Solana network being down for a full 48 hours. The team notified users of the problem on January 21 with the following message:
“The mainnet-beta cluster is experiencing some performance degradation, we are currently investigating the issue.”
More than 24 hours later, the cause was identified, with “excessive duplicate transactions” being the culprit. Eventually, the issue was resolved with the adoption of v1.8.14, an entire two days later after the problem was first discovered. Solana announced the following:
“These forthcoming releases are aimed at improving the state of the network, with more improvements expected to roll out in the next 8-12 weeks. Many of these features are currently live on Testnet, where they are being rigorously tested.”
Solana drawing ridicule for its performance
Backed by some of the biggest figures in the cryptocurrency space and equipped with serious venture capital funding power, Solana has long been the analyst’s darling to challenge Ethereum. Arguably, there is much to love about Solana: from its lightning-fast speed over near-zero transaction fees to many projects being copied from Ethereum to Solana and thus becoming more attainable to retail investors.
Still, persistent network outages have done little to refute the doubters that predicted that Solana’s lack of centralisation would be its eventual downfall. After the recent outage, Twitter users ridiculed Solana for repeatedly failing to resolve network outages. HarperCollins’ author Mark Jeffery said:
“This is like the sixth time this has happened in 3 months.I have zero faith in it now. It is the new EOS. The fight is now between ETH, BSC, Fantom, Avalanche and Terra.”
Tech investor Daniel Cheung was equally dismissive of Solana:
“Solana being down for 48 hours multiple times now makes me question the viability of a monolithic structure. It’s clear the winning blockchain of the future will likely be one with a modular architecture.”
DeFi users foot the bill
Investors can hardly be blamed either for being so outspoken about Solana’s issues. After all, its network users with outstanding loans with collateralised assets like SOL could not manage their positions during the outage and had to pay the price with massive liquidations across the board. Even in the cut-throat cryptocurrency space, leaving your users with the proverbial bill will cost projects a lot of goodwill and financial and political capital.
