Getting the story straight.
It’s no secret that many opponents of Solana love to cite the many instances of slowdown or outages that have plagued the blockchain, but many make these statements as if no other blockchain has had to deal with such issues. Anatoly Yakovenko is the founder of Solana Labs and has come forward to address these issues that have been seen by some to characterize the Solana blockchain.
During an interview with Raoul Pal and Real Vison entitled “Is Solana The Future Of Crypto?” Yakovenko made comments concerning the various challenges and issues faced by Solana as it was being adopted by the waves of new users. He stated that the speed of transactions were one of the main issues as the platform was coming into play.
“This is our biggest challenge, which is maybe one that I like to have because all these challenges are coming because we have users”
“there’s about 30 million transactions per day. Our peak day was 65 million. That’s more than all the other chains combined.”
Anatoly goes on the speak on other blockchains and how they did not have the amount of transactions that Solana had and the fact that the amount of transactions seen seemed to cause a bit of an issue with the blockchain due to workload.
“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.”
Validators and the amount of packets being handled by those validators were spoken on as well. The fact that Anatoly pointed to was that with so many validators running at such a high speed it may be possible for error if one of the validators obtained a bug or became compromised.
“If there’s a bug in any one of those validators where memory grows really, really quickly or something we didn’t do well for that load, that 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.”
Anatoly spoke on how Bitcoin was made to be more resilient and that if the Bitcoin chain was down for an hour or so it’s fine,but due to the way that Solana was created and how it works, if Solana were to be down for that amount of time it means the blockchain is dead.
Solana has undergone new programming and a new system was rolled out a little more than a month ago. Most of the issues of the blockchain have been said to have been handled by this new upgrade and a new “gas fee” system has been implemented as well. The Solana blockchain is still seeing success in the NFT sphere with the newest project Y00ts projected to bring a platform on par with Bored Apes of Ethereum.
