The Solana blockchain is once again in the spotlight following a significant outage that lasted over 20 hours on Feb. 25. The blockchain has suffered a dozen outages in the last two years, and experts point to the design of the system as the main reason behind its performance issues.
Solana Foundation’s report
On Feb. 27, Solana Status announced the Mainnet Beta Outage Report. The report provides details on the reasons behind the outage on Feb. 25, which caused a significant performance degradation at 05:46:16 UTC.
The root cause of the outage is still unknown, but the team is actively investigating to find the exact reason. The report will be updated periodically as new details become available
During the outage, validators entered vote-only mode, and the validator community agreed with engineers to downgrade to the previous stable release, v1.13.6.
This was decided during the second restart attempt after the initial restart attempt was called off to collect more data on the outage.
Experts have pointed out that Solana’s on-chain consensus design, which means all validator communications are on the chain, causes transaction volume and TPS to rise massively.
As a result, the Solana blockchain suffers outages as more activity impacts the system’s performance.
Crypto community reacts
As the Solana network suffered another setback, members of the crypto community took to social media to express their concerns. Some even compared the blockchain to other projects like Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Non-fungible token (NFT) artist Crypto Tea raised a question on how the Solana blockchain made it to the top 10 list while having such performance issues.
In response, Solana Mobile developer Andrew Watson pointed out that they chose “security over liveness” and that they are “in it for the long haul.”
Others raised concerns about putting decentralized finance protocols at risk of insolvency. However, some community members pointed out that the company’s approach is riskier, but it also paves the way for faster innovation.
On Feb. 27, the Solana Foundation published a new update about the issue. The blockchain’s Mainnet Beta was successfully restarted on Feb. 26, and “no confirmed user transactions were rolled back or impacted.”
However, the team highlighted that the root cause of the problem remains unknown and is still under investigation.
The Solana blockchain’s latest outage has caused immense angst in the community, with some even questioning the blockchain’s rank as a top cryptocurrency.
Nevertheless, the Foundation is actively investigating the issue and providing regular updates to the community. While performance issues continue to plague the Solana blockchain, the team remains committed to long-term growth and innovation.
