- Solana’s ease of use, market-leading TPS, and low fees are powerful advantages.
- However, this latest outage marks the eighth time Solana has halted this year.
- How serious is this problem, and what might happen next?
If you had a dollar for every Solana shutdown so far this year, you could buy 500 g of cashews at the local supermarket. (For those unfamiliar with the outrageously high price of nuts, the cost is about $8.)
As unpleasantly familiar as it is, last week Solana went down again — not to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, but because the mainnet lost consensus for seven hours. Ironically, this happened shortly after one of Solana’s co-founders told CNBC that Bitcoin would need to switch to Proof-of-Stake to stay relevant.
Earlier today a bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to nondeterminism when nodes generated different results for the same block, which prevented the network from advancing.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) June 1, 2022
Fallout
Solana reminds me of a pair of earbuds I used to own. They promised smooth sound and a clear mic, fit snugly while I exercised, and felt perfect in many ways. But months ago the right earbud started acting up, intermittently cutting out for five minutes or sometimes more than an hour, with no clear cause.
When they worked, the sound was glorious — Bruce Springsteen blasting at full volume, and it was amazing. But what’s the point of earbuds you can’t rely on to play music when you want?
Since Solana’s price has fallen by three quarters since New Year’s Day, the market clearly sees this as a serious issue (this is about Solana’s outages, not my music woes). All assets have suffered, but plotting Solana’s movement against Bitcoin shows the drop here is sharper than many other severe declines across crypto.
What it means going forward
I don’t have a computer science background. I’ve dabbled with R, Matlab, and Python, but I’m not qualified to judge the full technical complexity Solana’s developers face. Online you’ll find many people arguing emotionally whether these issues are just hiccups or insurmountable problems. I’m not interested in speculative takes that don’t add value.
Instead, I’ll use basic logic to assess the situation. Solana is a blockchain with extraordinary potential — it achieves higher transactions per second (TPS) than almost any other major cryptocurrency. But a blockchain that has an off switch is hardly meaningful. Frankly, I’m tired of qualifying Solana’s prospects with words like “potential,” “maybe,” and “might.”
This outage might be relatively benign on a quiet crypto day and, in some ways, that’s somewhat reassuring. But it’s still alarming to imagine what would happen if the next Solana outage occurred during a period of extreme market volatility — a massive rally or a sharp crash. Traders and investors could be unable to execute trades, buy, or sell Solana-based products at crucial moments.
Conclusion
Honestly, I’m growing weary of writing about Solana’s bugs. The network’s potential is real, but it’s meaningless unless these chronic failures are fixed. With a grim macro environment and a major rival like Ethereum approaching changes from its Merge that could reshape the industry, any slowdown or stagnation in Solana’s development could be devastating.
When it’s “on,” Solana is cheap to use, smooth, fast, and low-friction — a fantastic blockchain. Yet the project promised fixes for months and ultimately I had to buy new earbuds myself.
If these problems continue, the number of believers and investors willing to stick with Solana will shrink, and the outlook will darken. On the other hand, we can hope these hurdles turn out to be teething troubles overcome during the beta phase, and that one day people will look back and see these issues as minor steps on Solana’s path to wider adoption.
They say cats have nine lives — perhaps blockchains do too. If so, after eight outages this year, Solana may be approaching its last chances.