Altcoin
Analyst: Reason behind Solana’s network slowdown isn’t a DDoS attack, but…
Solana’s price rally has been exponential over the years. To be fair, other Ethereum competitors, including Cardano, Polkadot, Terra, etc have also seen major in price rallies. But Solana’s rise has been something special.
Not everything is hunky-dory
Solana is technically still in its beta phase. It is well known that Solana offers extreme transaction speeds but that speed comes at a price – the validator requirements are extremely high. This has resulted in other issues, primarily being due to validators who don’t have that high of a processing power to handle network activity. Such validator nodes can cause slowdowns or instability.
And this very flaw was exploited when recently the blockchain suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that slowed down the network’s speed. Needless to say, this gave rise to different speculations concerning the ecosystem. Some even echoed uncertainties around design flaws of the network Proof-of-history (PoH) protocol.
Clearing all the doubts….FUDs
The Head of Staking infrastructure at Rockaway Blockchain Fund, Tomáš Eminger tried to provide his narrative. He seemed to deny the DDoS story that has been doing the rounds. He said
,“It’s not a DDoS network attack as many said. The network hasn’t lost consensus, neither halted, just slowed down to 1000 TPS on 4 occasions since Dec 9.”
Source: Twitter
However he did admit that the possible Solana based DEX platform Raydium’s launch, could have been behind the reason for the congestion on the network. He explained the same in a tweet:
(3/6) This caused slow replay on the nodes and then the problem cascaded into the network, resulting in long slot confirmation times and slot leaders were missing their blocks.
— Tomáš Eminger (@EmiT87) December 11, 2021
Furthermore, Solana’s executives already commenced trials to provide a solution for the hiccup. Eminger noted:
“Anatoly Yakovenko and his team are working to backport this into version 1.8.9 which should be tested and approved for mainnet real soon.”
Here’s the Pre-release version:
Source: Twitter
Overall, Solana’s blockchain despite its success is still in the Mainnet-beta phase, so the software is still not perfect. However the developers have been hard at work to increase SOL’s use cases in this fast paced environment. Just recently, it collaborated with a leading browser to enable Opera Android users to enjoy seamless access to Solana dApps.
In addition to this, Raj Gokal, the co-founder of Solana also came out to support in a tweet saying speculators should step out of their bubbles.
when you exit the bubble, look back at the bubble, look at the people who built the bubble, and ask yourself if you want to go back into that bubble.
imho life is better outside the bubble. we’re building great products and converting users.
we look at graphs, not tweets
— Raj Gokal (@rajgokal) December 11, 2021
Overall, SOL‘s price has suffered. At press time, it was consolidating under the $169 mark post suffering a fresh 2.5% correction in the past 24 hours.
