Anatoly Yakovenko, a co-founder of Solana, is aware that its consumers are concerned about its outages. But a fix for the network could be approaching.
On the latest edition of the gm podcast, Yakovenko said that this has been the hardest problem for them, and the first priority.
Since its introduction in 2020, the hybrid proof-of-stake, proof-of-history blockchain has seen five significant outages. Three of the five incidents—all the consequence of either Solana’s code faults or the network being overloaded by artificial traffic from bots—have happened this year.
Because Firedancer, a Solana client, will have its own distinct software development team, Yakovenko thinks it will be a “long-term fix”. Firedancer is being developed by Web3 company Jump Crypto in collaboration with the Solana Foundation.
Within the next one to two years, Jump Crypto anticipates that Firedancer will greatly expand Solana, enabling it to perform more transactions more effectively.
The likelihood of them having the same faults in their code as the network becomes almost minimal because it’s a different team, according to Yakovenko.
As stated by the co-founder, human error is mostly to blame for the present problems with Solana. Yakovenko asserted that Solana is quite complicated and that “this is still software written by humans.” “It’s a monolithic chain, so it’s like Ethereum but it does everything, all at once.”
The co-founder referred to the latest Solana outage, which was brought on by a validator that was improperly setup, confusing the Solana network and leaving it unclear of which fork was the right one, resulting in the network stalling.
“But at no point do failures like these put any users’ funds or program state at risk, because Solana has 2,000 different validators,” Yakovenko said.
Solana has more than 2,000 validators and roughly 3,400 separate network replicas, resulting in a large number of backups to select from in the case of a severe failure.
“As long as one of these copies survives, you can effectively recover the whole network,” Yakovenko said.
The co-founder pointed out that aside from Solana’s 5 outages, there have also been instances where the network experienced so much traffic that it became “unusable.”
Ethereum, the top blockchain for DeFi and NFTs, has a history of experiencing network congestion. For example, the introduction of the $561 million “Otherside” NFT by Yuga Labs in April 2017 caused Ethereum to stutter as a result of network congestion. The network also collapsed in 2017 under the weight of the CryptoKitties NFTs.
