Network outages have been Solana's 'curse', says co-founder

The high-throughput smart contract platform has experienced full or partial outages at least seven times in the past twelve months.< /p> New

Network outages continue to be the Solana network's biggest challenge, according to its co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

Launched in 2020, the Solana network has suffered a number of network outages, which are due to a number of different congestion and spam events, according to Yakovenko.

In a September 2 interview with Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal, Yakovenko said the network outages had been Solana's "curse", but said the outages were due to low transaction network cost.

"That has been, I suppose, our curse, but it's because the network is so cheap and so fast that there are enough users and applications driving it."

However, although the outages "prevented users" from using the network, Solana's CEO said the network itself was not compromised. He also argued that each blockchain is built differently and has its own "failure case".

For example, Yakovenko noted that when Bitcoin network block production stopped for two hours in the past, it was still considered normal.

"[Bitcoin] is designed to be extremely resilient [...] when a bunch of Chinese hashing power came to a halt, there were times when there were two hours between Bitcoin blocks. And it's very good", he explained, adding that the same stoppage of production would be considered a failure for Solana.

"If there are two hours between blocks in Solana, the network is dead because it is designed to create a block every 400 milliseconds."

Solana was designed to be a low-cost, high transaction speed smart contract platform that processes "30 million transactions per day", making it "more than all other chains combined" , said Yakovenko

"Once you build a faster network, the failure case is different than on something like Bitcoin or Ethereum."

However, Yakovenko argued that blackouts themselves aren't entirely a bad thing...