Solana Network Outages Weren’t Caused By Validator Messages Or On-Chain Voting, Says CEO

On Mar 1, 2023

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What – Solana network has recorded some outages in recent times.
Why – The last one lasted 20 hours, causing the users to create diverse speculations about the root causes.
What Next – One user attributed the downtime to the consensus layer’s massive validator messages and on-chain voting systems.

However, Solana Labs CEO and Founder negated such observations stating that it’s born out of pure ignorance. Also, in a post, by Solana Foundation outlining details of the Beta outage, the developers are yet to identify the root cause of the downtime.

Solana Network Outages

Solana network facilitates the creation of decentralized applications. It combines both proof-of-history and proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms to improve scalability. By that, Solana blockchain is positioned to accommodate many applications without collapsing, thereby increasing usability. Moreover, the network offers short processing time, lowering the time it takes to validate transactions and execute smart contracts.

However, a Twitter user, DBCryptoX, shared a post stating that the Solana network was down again, making it up to twelve times it has happened. In the post, DBCryptoX lamented the situation speculating that Solana’s massive on-chain activities, including validator messages and voting, caused the downtime.

However, the Solana Foundation post on February 27 revealed the network suffered performance degradation. As a result, the validator community restarted the network based on the engineers’ recommendation. Afterward, the network resumed its normal work of processing transactions.

Moreover, in the February 27 post, the SF revealed that developers were yet to identify the cause of the outage but were investigating it then.

Solana’s CEO and Others Refute Network Outage Speculation

The Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko further reacted to the Twitter post, pointing at a network design as the cause of the outage. In his tweet, the CEO declared that such a theory was a product of pure ignorance. He explained that adding on-chain votes as transactions contributes to the security, high throughput, and low fees on the network.

He didn’t directly negate the claim that validator messages and on-chain votes make up 90-95% of Solana network transactions. In DBCryptoX theory, these massive transactions are boggling down the network. Also, DBCryptoX claimed the outage lasted 20 hours because validators spent considerable time meeting and reaching a consensus on a solution.

However, a commentator on the DBCryptoX post refuted the theory. Software Engineer Alex Kroeger of Wallet Phantom on Solana responded that the network outage is not due to one singular factor.

Surprised this thread is doing numbers, it’s not quite right.
The reasons for the outages have been varied, but I don’t think it’s correct to say they’ve been due to votes being on-chain.
Proof of stake systems require a lot of network communication for validation, period.
— DeFiCorgi.eth (@alex_kroeger) February 27, 2023

In his tweet, Kroeger stated that DBCryptoX’s theory is wrong and that validations on Proof of stake systems usually require massive network communication. He said Solana handles communications on-chain to facilitate efficient leader selection and easy transaction propagation.

Meanwhile, SOL is down today in the last 24 hours but up by 13% in trading volume.

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