Solana outage triggers ballistic reaction from the crypto community

A community member argued that outages are putting decentralized finance protocols running on Solana at risk of insolvency.

As the Solana network suffered another setback, crypto community members went on social media to express various concerns, even comparing the blockchain to other projects like Ethereum and Bitcoin. 

On Feb. 25, the Solana network faced performance degradation issues, resulting in transaction disruptions, leading validators to opt for a network restart. Seemingly tired of the same old story, members of the community expressed themselves on Twitter, with some even questioning Solana’s (SOL) rank as a top cryptocurrency.

Amid the network issues, nonfungible token (NFT) artist Crypto Tea raised a question on how the Solana blockchain made it to the top 10 list while having such performance issues. She tweeted:

Solana is down for a co-ordinated restart

A tech issue was throttling transactions and the blockchain started to unexpectedly fork

How is this pos in the top 10 crypto list?

— Crypto Tea (@CryptoTea_) February 25, 2023

Responding to the tweet, Solana Mobile developer Andrew Watson said that they chose “security over liveness” and pointed out that they are “in it for the long haul.” In replying to Watson, another community member raised other concerns, such as putting decentralized finance protocols at risk of insolvency.

Apart from these, other community members started to compare Solana to Ethereum and Bitcoin. A community member highlighted in a Twitter thread that Ethereum went with the slow but sure route, while Solana chose to move fast while sometimes breaking. The Twitter user said that while Solana’s approach is riskier, it also paves the way for faster innovation. 

Meanwhile, a Bitcoin supporter also pointed out how Bitcoin (BTC) never needs a restart in the midst of Solana’s network issues. 

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On Feb. 27, the Solana Foundation published a new update about the issue. According to the team, the Solana Mainnet Beta was successfully restarted on Feb. 26, and “no confirmed user transactions were rolled back or impacted.” However, the team highlighted that, at the moment, the root cause of the problem remains unknown and is still under investigation.

The Solana blockchain has met some notable outages through the years. In Sept. 2021, a major outage was caused by a denial-of-service attack by bots spamming Raydium. On May 2022, bots invaded the network, causing a 7-hour outage. In June 2022, a consensus failure due to a bug caused another outage, driving SOL’s price down.