Bessie Liu

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                <li>The outage was handled swiftly in less than 4 1/2 hours</li>
                <li>Solana developers made “fundamental design choices” to improve base layer throughput — at the expense of network reliability, industry exec says </li>
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<p>The Solana network took another reputational hit this week, booking its latest in a series of outages in 2022. </p>



<p>The most recent downtime, this Wednesday, came just a month after bots swarmed popular non-fungible token (NFT) minting protocol Candy Machine, pushing validators out of consensus and crashing nodes. </p>



<p>This time, validators — which sign off on block transactions — were manipulated so that the network ceased to produce blocks, as validators were prevented from reaching a consensus. The network was restarted about 4 ½ hours later.&nbsp;</p>



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">1/10 Yesterday, <a href="https://twitter.com/solana?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@solana</a> broke down but we fixed it with what might be the fastest hardfork in the history of the ecosystem. Just 4.5 hours and the blockchain stuck in a rut was free and running again. Here’s a thread about how it happened 🧵</p>&mdash; Everstake (@everstake_pool) <a href="https://twitter.com/everstake_pool/status/1532334632590622721?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 2, 2022</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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<p>Michael Arrington, founder of Arrington Capital, a crypto investment firm, told Blockworks that Solana’s developers have made “fundamental design choices” to improve base layer throughput — at the expense of network reliability.</p>



<p>“We don&#8217;t believe these technical trade-offs are necessary, and there are other networks, like Bitcoin and Algorand, which do not sacrifice robustness for performance,” Arrington said.</p>



<p>Following the downturn, Solana’s <a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solana/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">market capitalization</a> dropped by over 11% in 24 hours. It is trading at roughly $40 as of 7 pm ET, down by over 80% since its all-time high of $260.06 in November 2021.</p>



<p>Even so, Sergey Vasylchuk, CEO of Everstake, Solana’s biggest validator and co-developer of Metaplex, said he’s still optimistic on the beleaguered protocol.</p>



<p>&nbsp;&#8220;The blockchain industry is up and running, and it&#8217;s common for new areas to face crises,” Vasylchuk told Blockworks. “For the past four years, my company has been running over 8,000 nodes for 50 blockchain networks. We&#8217;ve been in Solana since the very beginning of its story. What I can say for sure is that the Solana community knows how to tackle problems very fast.”</p>



<p>The relatively short span of the outage, Vasylchuk said, points to the ecosystem learning from past mistakes.</p>



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Sergey Vasylchuk

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Blockworks Research