Yesterday it experienced Solana (SOL) briefly big problems. These problems were due to a network overload. At one point, some 400,000 transactions per second (TPS) were being processed and this became too much for the network.
It caused the memory to fill up completely, that nodes completely disconnected from the network and the blockchain even started to fork, or split it up. The administrators were unable to solve these problems immediately and so the Solana network was down for no less than 16 hours.
The network has now been successfully restarted. In addition, an upgrade for the network was immediately applied. The applications that work on the Solana network will follow as soon as possible.
Gavin Wood speaks out
Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot (DOT), which is of course a competitor of Solana, has joined today not exactly positive outspoken about the problems at Solana. According to him, the problems encountered are the result of a significant error in the design of the project.
According to Wood, it is problematic that a decentralized network, such as Solana claims to be, is not able to solve problems in an equally decentralized way. In this case, it had to validators agreed to restart the network. According to Wood, this is a fundamentally central solution.
He also lashes out at the transaction capacity of the network. He argues that it makes little sense to have a network that is capable of processing huge amounts of transactions per second if the network is not 100% decentralized. If a high TPS is achieved without a distributed network of nodes, then the project has little value, says Wood.
Events of today in crypto just go to show that genuine decentralization and well-designed security make a far more valuable proposition than some big tps numbers coming from an exclusive and closed set of servers. If you can’t run a full-node yourself then it’s just another bank.
— Gavin Wood (@gavofyork) September 14, 2021
As the big man behind competitive Polkadot, Gavin Wood is obviously quite partisan. So take his words with a healthy grain of salt. In addition, Solana indicates time and again that they are still in the beta phase and that obstacles are inevitable.