Like many so-called “Ethereum killer” projects, the Solana blockchain has yet to deliver on its promise in any meaningful way.
While fast and scalable in theory, the network has a history of multiple outages that have never been fully resolved. The network has never been at full capacity. Solana is supposed to handle 50,000 TPS* (transactions per second), but peaks around 1,000 TPS in real-world conditions — with 30-60 second latency.
While impressive by blockchain standards, these speeds fall short of widely advertised speeds and are irrelevant in a context of never-ending network congestion.
Solana’s Series of Blockages
As of April, 75% of all non-voting SOL transactions failed, mainly due to demand for memecoins on the network. Users have complained about degraded user experience. The high rate of failed transactions is largely due to spikes in bot activity – not exactly a remarkable endorsement for the network.
Solana’s history of frequent network failures is superior to other major chains. The network suffered a five-hour outage on February 6, two months before the April outage. In January 2022, it suffered a 58-hour outage. The network has suffered nine outages since 2021, lasting more than 150 hours.
Spectra Cities founder Ryan Rzepecki, said Solana’s “entire thesis” is broken by memecoins if they disrupt the core operations of the chain as “a moment of survival.”
Solana’s official uptime report (shown on the homepage) is also problematic, showing 100% uptime in the months that exchanges (such as Coinbase) and users reported Severe network outages. Network congestion is the reason this chain is most known. That’s important on a blockchain whose main advantages are throughput and scalability.
Cis it a phase?
However, the Solana bulls say congestion is a natural consequence of success. Ethereum has addressed similar concerns about congestion, while Bitcoin has had to increase block sizes. Therefore, Solana will continue to be the most successful blockchain because the fastest, cheapest chain will win.
Meanwhile, Noah Prince, head of protocol engineering at the Helium Foundation, said that Solana’s outage was the result of “abuse.”
Solana’s problems, however, run much deeper and cannot be solved so easily. The constant network outages and inability to handle high traffic and memecoin activity are failures by any metric. The core product is essentially unusable.
Uptime performance is a primary consideration in determining the reliability of any network. There is simply no way to describe a blockchain with hours-long outages as “high performance.”
Solana’s Unacceptable Uptime Performance
Solana is a low-cost chain and this is by far the main strength of the network. It offers the lowest fees of any major chain. This is what attracted so many bots and users, overwhelming the network. The network also recovered extremely well after the FTX scandal, which many predicted would completely destroy the ecosystem.
Average Transaction Fees on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana | Source: Visa
Solana will continue to be popular among retail investors, especially while memecoins are popular. It’s the easiest and cheapest way to launch a meme project, thereby attracting more users aiming for 100x, as well as bots. But for Solana to be taken seriously, the network needs to last a long time without serious outages. That is the basic level for network stability.
In 2018, Visa’s network was down for 10 hours. It was such a big problem that it sparked huge media coverage. Visa must compensate the cardholder and issue an official apology. They have not experienced any problems since that time and are able to accommodate more traffic than Solana. That’s the kind of stability needed to have real-world utility.
That’s not even complicated or controversial. An outage is the worst thing that can happen to any network. It’s strange to see such errors considered early difficulties by the community. Imagine if Visa crashed nearly a dozen times in four years — going offline for more than 150 hours — but still claimed it was a positive “network strengthening” phenomenon.
So Solana needs to start delivering on her promises instead of banishing them.
*TPS (transactions per second), is a unit of measurement used to measure the transaction processing ability of a blockchain system or other computer network. This is an important index to evaluate the scalability and performance of a blockchain. It represents the number of transactions the blockchain network can process in a fixed period of time, usually per second.
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According to Cointelegraph
