Solana down again for unknown reasons, the community angrily mocks "design flaw"

Solana (SOL), which is described by its supporters as the " Ethereum killer", has crashed again.

On February 25, the Solana mainnet beta unexpectedly stopped processing almost all transactions: the transaction processing speed dropped by nearly 99% in an instant. Official website data showed that Solana's transaction bandwidth dropped from 4,300 transactions per second to 42 transactions per second (TPS).

A few hours later, the project team attempted to restart the network for the first time, but failed. The deep freeze continued, and even evolved from slow transaction processing to an almost complete interruption of on-chain activities. Block production stopped and user transactions could not be processed or verified. After further analysis, the validator performed a second restart to bring the backend infrastructure back online and resume user transactions. This was more than 24 hours after the problem was first discovered.

According to a newly released report from the Solana Foundation, the reasons behind the “significant” drop in performance remain unknown.

The community questions Solana’s design flaws?

Solana's frequent outages are nothing new. Bitpush previously reported that in September 2021, a denial of service (DoS) attack on Grape Protocol's initial DEX product (IDO) caused the platform to go down for more than a dozen hours. In January 2022, Solana trading was stagnant for 18 hours. In May 2022, the Solana network was hacked by robots again, causing a 7-hour outage. In June 2022, the price of SOL fell due to another outage caused by a consensus failure caused by an error.

The outage again drew the ire of the crypto community, with some members questioning the reliability of the network.

Paul Brody, blockchain program lead at Ernst & Young, blasted: “The Solana blockchain is like an office worker who ‘rests’ at night and on weekends. When will we admit that Solana is a joke? How can we [build] critical infrastructure on this basis?”

NFT artist Crypto Tea questioned how the Solana blockchain could make the top 10 with such performance issues. In response to the tweet, Solana Mobile developer Andrew Watson said they chose “security over liveness,” noting that they are “in this for the long haul.” In replying to Watson, another community member raised additional concerns, saying that every outage puts decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols on the Solana network “at risk of insolvency.”

Other members pointed out flaws in Solana's design. Community member DBCryptoX believes that the repeated network outages are a byproduct of a "major design flaw" in the Solana blockchain. He explained that Solana handles all consensus on-chain, which means that all validator communications are counted as on-chain transactions (TX), while actual transaction volume accounts for a small proportion (the pink part in the bar chart, the blue-green part is the validator message/vote, which usually accounts for 90-95%). Since most of the transaction volume consists of validator messages, this "puts the system in trouble." When the network fails, validators cannot communicate with each other. In this case, validators can only decide the next step through Discord. The problem is that two-thirds of the validators must agree to reach a consensus for it to occur, and some people may already be offline.

Other community members began comparing Solana to Ethereum and Bitcoin. One community member emphasized on Twitter that Ethereum took the slow and steady route, while Solana chose to move fast and sometimes fail. The Twitter user said that while Solana's approach is riskier, it also paves the way for faster innovation.

Solana ecosystem activity remains stable

Despite the negative feedback from the community, the price of SOL has not been affected by the negative sentiment on social media. At the time of writing, SOL is trading at $22.72, up 70.50% in the past three months, and remains one of the best performing crypto assets in 2023.

On the other hand, the Solana ecosystem continues to remain active, with NFT sales on its network accounting for 14% of the total NFT market sales.

Solana is hailed by its supporters as the "Ethereum killer", claiming to provide lower transaction costs and faster processing speeds. Solana supports different types of crypto applications, including lending, trading, and NFT tokens. One of its most staunch supporters is Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and former CEO of the FTX exchange. After SBF was arrested and FTX and its affiliate Alameda Research collapsed, Solana's reputation was also implicated, and the native token SOL plummeted.

The Solana Foundation revealed that it had deposited about $1 million in cash or cash equivalents with FTX before filing for bankruptcy. Solana founders told Bloomberg in December that they have been doing everything they can to cut off any ties with Bankman-Fried, FTX or Alameda. As of press time, the price of SOL is hovering around $22, while the price in January was close to its historical low of around $10.

As of press time, the root cause of the outage remains unknown. The Solana Foundation said it is investigating the cause of the outage and will announce the results soon.