Outages on Solana have become quite common of late. Now and then the network is being halted to resolve issues. Just yesterday, for instance, the mainnet was victimized by nondeterminism that prevented the network from advancing further.
The network’s validators did not process new blocks for several hours, and as a result, applications built on Solana’s blockchain were taken offline. However, within a few hours, the issue had been resolved and the network was back online.
The previous outage, as such, happened at the beginning of May. Back then, the network was halted for roughly seven hours before a successful restart. Fingers were pointed towards the surging transactions at that time.
Before that, in January, the blockchain network had reported excessive duplicate transactions being carried out. Back then, Solana had outrightly acknowledged the “congestion” issues and strived towards improving them.
Even before that, in September last year, Solana had experienced a 17-hour outage which it had attributed to “resource exhaustion.”
State of the Solana network
As highlighted, the state of affairs on the Solana network has been deteriorating for quite some time, and the same has been visible in the state of affairs.
Consider this – Back in April 2020, Solana’s official tweet proclaimed that its blockchain could process 50,000 transactions per second. In fact, per a more recent Barron’s report, “Solana can process an industry-leading 65,000 transactions per second or TPS.”
At press time, nonetheless, the TPS was quite far from the aforementioned ceilings and stood at a malnourished 1830. However, it is interesting to note that the average cost to execute the said transactions revolved around just $0.00025 at press time.
When compared to Ethereum, nonetheless, the Solana network was in a much better position. Per data, the OG network handles only approximately 13 transactions per second, while its transaction fees are considerably more expensive than Solana’s.
Well, it is a known fact that Solana has already been dubbed as an Ethereum-killer. However, if network issues continue to persist and get worse with time, people would start flocking out of its arena en-masse. As a result, it might end up killing itself, despite being in an advantageous position relative to Ethereum. If things get better, however, then the intensity of competition in the space would intensify and Solana might end up getting a chance to lead the troop.