Solana Founder Explains Why The Blockchain Network Experiences Frequent Outages

Solana (SOL) founder Anatoly Yakovenko says the blockchain's incredible transaction speed doesn't leave much wiggle room and poses various challenges for the smart contract platform.

In a new interview with Raoul Pal, the founder of the investment firm Real Vision, Yakovenko said Solana has seen higher transaction values than all the other blockchains combined. At its peak, it saw 65 million transactions while the average value is around 30 million, which was "more than all the other chains combined."

"Binance Smartchain is one-tenth of that. I think Ethereum is one-thirtieth. And because of this load, we've seen things that we didn't expect, and we were a bit short-sighted in the kinds of attacks people would throw at the network," said Yakovenko.

Solana is a mixture of proof-of-stake and the novel proof-of-history consensus. It also uses validators to check transitions. Yakovenko explained that a single validator might get as many as 10 million packets per second and if any one of these packets was bugged, the "memory grows really, really quickly" and the "validator could shut down, it could break, it could run out of memory, for whatever reason."

"If a third of them do that, then the network is basically stalled until some manual intervention brings it back up. That has happened a couple of times," Yakovenko revealed.

Speaking about Solana's outages, he said different blockchains have different architectures and they fail in separate ways.

"[Bitcoin] is designed to be extremely resilient, and some things that are normal for Bitcoin, like when a bunch of Chinese hash power shut down, there were times where there are two hours between blocks in Bitcoin. And that's totally fine," Yakovenko said, while adding that "if there's two hours between blocks in Solana, the network's dead because it is designed to make a block every 400 milliseconds."

The Solana founder, who previously worked at Qualcomm, said since Solana is faster, its failure cases are different from that of Bitcoin or Ethereum.

The Solana network has faced around five outages so far this year. One of the longest halts was in 2021 when the platform was disrupted for 17 hours. The market was bullish at the time.