The Solana (SOL) network grew fast in 2021, but in 2022 the cryptocurrency is having a much harder time. This is of course because all prices have fallen heavily this year, but Solana is also struggling with outages. The blockchain has already failed five times in 2022.
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, calls the outages the biggest stumbling block for the network. In an interview with Raoul Pal of Real Vision, the co-founder even calls it a “curse”:
Yakovenko says the frequent problems are because the network is so fast and cheap compared to other blockchains.
“I think that was our curse, but it’s because the network is so cheap and fast that there are plenty of users and applications powering it.”
This makes Solana popular, but also makes it a target for hackers. That is how Solana previously went down due to a large denial of service, or DDoS, attack.
Solana outages compared to Bitcoin
Still, the founder says that despite all the outages, the network has never been compromised or hacked. He also emphasizes that every blockchain has its advantages and disadvantages.
For example, Yakovenko says that Bitcoin (BTC) has also gone down in the past, but this was not labeled as such. When China introduced the ban on bitcoin mining, it sometimes took two hours for blocks to be processed, while normally this should take 10 minutes.
If this happens to Solana, it is immediately labeled a failure, says the co-founder. That’s because Solana processes transactions not every 10 minutes, but every 400 milliseconds.
“If there are two hours between blocks in Solana, the network is dead because it is designed to create a block every 400 milliseconds.
This is our biggest challenge, but maybe one I like because these challenges are the result of the users we have on a daily basis.”
The BTC price is down about 70% this year, but SOL is down as much as 85%.