Some have questioned how the network remains a top ten blockchain, but others remain bullish
The Solana network has suffered another major outage, triggering a divided response from users. The 20-hour outage is the ninth in a series of outages and technical problems that have plagued the network since its 2020 debut.
The network went down early on Saturday, November 25, but the cause is still unknown. Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana co-founder, recently shut down claims that the outage was caused by on-chain votes and validator messages clogging up the network.
Since launching in 2020, Solana has quickly grown to become the ninth-largest blockchain by total value of assets. It’s also home to a thriving NFT and DeFi ecosystem. Upon its launch, Solana was marketed as an “Ethereum killer”, offering smart contract functionality with substantially lower fees and higher speeds than Ethereum.
The network’s outages though have left some people doubting whether Solana is a viable Ethereum alternative.
Solana hosts a number of DeFi Dapps, with 168 projects on the chain, including aggregators, exchanges, lending platforms and more. One Twitter user pointed out DeFi “doesn’t work” on chains that have regular outages.
Other users, such as NFT artist Crypto Tea, questioned how Solana remains a top ten blockchain while facing so many technical issues.
Other Solana users took the outage in their stride, arguing that it’s the cost of innovation. The recent outage also had little impact on the price of SOL, demonstrating a layer-1 with strong market resilience.
The February 25 outage was one of the longest in Solana’s short history. Other notable outages occurred in May and June 2022, the former due to bots spamming Raydium; the latter due to bug-induced consensus failure.
Earlier this year, Yakovenko told Decrypt that Firedancer, a validator client, will provide a “long-term fix” for the outages that have plagued the network since 2020.
