Solana Goes Down Again; Community Worries It’s No Longer Safe

The Solana blockchain suffered yet another downtime incident Tuesday, its fourth in just the last 12 months. The Solana community on social media platforms like Twitter, Telegram and Reddit is debating whether this was caused by another DDoS attack or just network issues.

The incident clogged the network and caused transactions to fail. The downtime may have been caused by the creation of empty transactions on the network that create congestion and put the network offline.

Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko denied there had been a DDoS attack. Replying to a tweet by a user, he said, “it's not a DDoS, just pain of getting a new runtime commercialized.”

A DDoS attack generally refers to a large number of coordinated devices, or a botnet, overwhelming a network with fake traffic to take it offline.

Yakovenko wrote in another thread by a different user: “Sorry, that’s not at all what happened. There was some congestion due to mis metered transitions, and some users experienced their txs timing out and had to retry.”

The network regained its functionality at 2 a.m. ET on Tuesday.

Irrespective of the cause, the Solana community does not seem happy with the constant network issues. The “Ethereum Killer” is facing serious backlash on social media. In a long Reddit discussion, a user who goes by the name u/set1less wrote, “A network that goes down this often will never be able to attract serious traders”.

“Imagine you are trading on margin and get liquidated because the network was down...this happens in centralised exchanges. Solana now natively brings this kind of user experience to the blockchain where you can experience network failure on the chain,” the user added.

On Twitter, a user who goes by the handle “antifascio20” wrote, “I'm starting to think this blockchain isn't safe.”

In September, the Solana Network was down for nearly 17 hours after it was overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

In November, Yakovenko told The Block Crypto that it doesn't really matter if the network goes down again. He argued that as long as there’s at least one copy of the ledger, the funds are safe and the transactions will eventually get processed. If you don’t care how long a transaction takes to go through, “then how much do you care that there's a 72-hour block?” he asked.

Solano was at $168.81m up 1%, Wednesday at 12.53 a.m. ET, according to data by Coinmarketcap. The total value locked (TVL) of Solana is $11.55 billion, Defilama showed.

Photo: AFP / INA FASSBENDER