Looking on paper, Solana is easily one of the most promising blockchains for the future in Web3.
Solana is arguably the fastest-growing blockchain in the world. The blockchain, which has been in operation since 2017, is one of the fastest chains, with a transaction speed of 3,000 TPS (theoretically, up to 710,000).
The Solana blockchain is also extremely scalable and achieves this astonishing speed with a hybrid proof-of-history (PoH)/proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus process.
But despite all these qualities, the blockchain has been plagued with several technical difficulties over the years.
Solana has gone through eight major outages throughout its existence. In the latest one, the blockchain was inoperative for over several hours.
In August, there was a heist of Solana tokens, which occurred as a result of a vulnerability caused by the centralized Sentry server.
The “recurring” accident has left a bad mark on Solana – some users and investors can’t help but label the blockchain as “untrustworthy” and not as safe as its competitors.
What Is Solana Doing To Fix It?
The blockchain has gone through several ecosystem updates in order to make Solana operate better and more reliably.
Most recently, Solana has released Mainnet-v1.10.40 and v1.13.2, which fix the bug that caused the network outage last week.
This is one of many other updates that the blockchain has been working in order to fix any possible issues in the future.
But Why Does It Happen?
Last week’s Solana outages were caused by a configuration error in one of the blockchain’s validators.
The flaw resulted in the validator’s repeated instructions being executed in a loop, which means that when it comes time to produce a block, some validators see the block A instruction, while others see the block B instruction.
As a result, the blockchain couldn’t tell which block was broken, causing the network to go down.
The issue of Solana’s “inactivity time” has been frequently criticized by the community.
Aside from the more than ten hours of inactivity last week, Solana has recently experienced a number of periods of inactivity or network outage.
