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

cointelegraph.com:

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 have come from a number of different congestion and spam events, according to Yakovenko.

In a Sept. 2 interview with Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal, Yakovenko said the network outages had been Solana’s “curse,” but said the outages have resulted because of the network's low-cost transactions. 

However, while the outages have “prevented users” from using the network, the Solana CEO said the network itself hasn’t been compromised. He also argued that each blockchain is built differently and has their own “failure case.”

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

“[Bitcoin] is designed to be extremely resilient [...] when a bunch of Chinese hash power shut down, there were times where there are two hours between blocks in Bitcoin. And that’s totally fine,” he explained, adding that the same production halt would be seen as a failure for Solana.

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

However, Yakovenko argued that the outages themselves aren’t entirely a bad thing “because all [of] these challenges are coming because we have users.”

“This is our biggest challenge, which is maybe the one that I like to have because of all these challenges that are coming because we have users on the chain on a daily basis," he added. 

Related: Reliably unreliable: Solana price dives after