Anatoly Yakovenko, a co-founder of Solana, in response to the various network downtime the blockchain suffered in the past months stated that different recent modifications will aid the blockchain in resolving these problems.
On Nov. 5, Yakovenko spoke about the blockchain’s past and future in Lisbon, Portugal at the Breakpoint 2022 annual conference, pointing out challenges the network has encountered recently:
“We’ve had a lot of challenges over the last year, I would say this whole last year has been all about reliability.”
According to its own status reporting, Solana has experienced ten partial or full outages. The most prominent of these occurred between January 6 and 12, 2022, when the network was afflicted by problems that resulted in partial outages and performance degradation for between 8 and 18 hours. The most recent lasted about six and a half hours on October 1 and was referred to as a “serious outage.”
Solana experienced clock drift between the end of May and the beginning of June as a result of longer than usual slot times (also known as block times), the period of time during which a validator can send a block to Solana.
Although Yakovenko noted that “things got very really terrible in June,” block times “reached up to over a second, which is really sluggish for Solana,” and in some instances “confirmation times so we’re taking 15 to 20 seconds:”
“That’s not the experience that we want to deliver and that’s a pretty bad Web2 experience when you’re competing with Google with Facebook with all these other applications.”
A recent update with the validator count increasing in the previous year, according to Yakovenko, placed Solana on the right track to overcoming the network performance difficulties, and he added:
“[We’re] in a constant fight between performance, security, throughput, and decentralization, all of these problems […] whenever you improve one you may actually hurt some of the other ones but I think we’ve done an amazing job in solving a bunch of those.”
Its August cooperation with Web3 development company Jump Crypto to create Solana’s scaling solution called Firedancer, labeled the long-term remedy to the network outage problem, may hold the key. “Obviously we still have challenges with outages and bugs,” he said.
“The possibility of the same bug occurring with a second implementation and a second client written by a different team with a wholly independent code base is almost zero.”
