Tag: solana network

Solana Network Resume Operation after Long Hours Shutdown

The Solana network is back online after long hours of outage.

The restart process was a laborious task that took several hours to stabilise the network proved unworkable. Eventually, a restart patch was released to validators that worked, and as a result, a successful reactivation happened in the early hours of Wednesday, September 15.

However, the return to normal service operations was not immediate, as the Solana Foundation announced: “The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25. Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.”

Solana blockchain crashed on Tuesday, September 14, an incident caused by a surge in activity on the network. The firm stated ”intermittent instability” had disrupted some of its services during that day after Solana’s transaction load peaked at 400,000 transactions per second.

Solana’s team stated that such transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and the lack of prioritisation of network-critical messaging caused the network to begin forking. The flocking incident happened after transactions flooded in and caused the Solana blockchain network split and the software of different miners or validators to unaligned.

Transactions peaked on Tuesday and caused excessive memory consumption, and prompted network nodes to go offline.

Solana was not the only network that witnessed a shutdown on Tuesday. Ethereum’s L2 scaling solution – Arbitrum, also experienced an outage, but such networks have proven their capabilities as they have garnered positive traction once again.

The recent network shutdown adversely affected the price of SOL, the network’s native token, plunging its value to a low of $145 per coin, down almost 13% on Tuesday. But later, Solana cryptocurrency managed to recover some of its value to trade at around $160.2 at 05:45 ET on Wednesday, according to CoinMarketCap. Last week, SOL climbed to an all-time high of above $200, despite a massive sell-off on the broader cryptocurrency market.

Solana Co-founder Labels Ethereum 'Bourgeois Digital Tyranny

In a fiery discourse on Twitter between 1st and 2nd October 2023, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, robustly defended the accessibility and inclusivity of the Solana network, engaging in a series of tweets that delved into the philosophies underpinning various blockchain platforms.

Network Accessibility Debate

The debate ignited with a tweet from user @jebus911 on 1st October, drawing parallels between Solana (native token SOL) and the Democratic Party, criticizing both for purportedly lacking an understanding of value creation and harboring a desire for cheap solutions. In a retort, Yakovenko elucidated his stance later that day, juxtaposing Ethereum against Solana and critiquing Ethereum for representing what he termed as “bourgeois digital tyranny.” He advocated for a “stateless digital dominion” where the cost of state creation is negligible, heralding a truly decentralized network.

Criticism of Solana’s Node Operation Costs

The discussion intensified on 2nd October when user @RuzhyoX spotlighted the high costs associated with running nodes or validators on the Solana network, suggesting it inadvertently favors corporate entities over individual participants. Yakovenko rebutted, positing that anyone capable of building from source possesses the requisite skill set for a tech job, which would render running a node affordable. This exchange catalyzed further deliberations among the crypto community on Twitter.

Community Reactions

The debate wasn’t devoid of humor, with @AceofSolana querying if Yakovenko’s eloquent defense was generated by ChatGPT, prompting a whimsical response from Yakovenko, “If you have to ask, ngmi” (an acronym for “not gonna make it”).

Comparing Ethereum and Solana

Ethereum and Solana, both notable in the blockchain arena, exhibit diverging technical and philosophical ideologies. Ethereum, a foundational platform, is pivotal to the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Token (NFT) spheres, albeit grappling with scalability and transaction fee hurdles. In contrast, Solana, renowned for its high throughput and economical transaction fees, harnesses a distinctive Proof of History (PoH) and Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, targeting scalable solutions for a myriad of applications without forsaking decentralization.

Their smart contract frameworks, albeit similar, diverge in consensus models for transaction validation, reflecting their distinct approaches toward harmonizing security, decentralization, and scalability, thereby offering a spectrum of choices for developers and enterprises in the blockchain ecosystem.

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