Solana [SOL] co-founder responds to network outage

• Solana’s recent network outage has prompted theories from crypto influencers about design flaws in the network.
• Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko defended his network’s on-chain consensus model.

Solana [SOL] suffered a major network outage over the weekend that saw network communications and transactions paused for 20 hours. This was the latest in a series of outages that the Solana network has suffered over the past few months, leading to several theories about this recurring issue.

Crypto content creator DBCryptoX had one such theory, which stated that Solana’s recurring network outages were due to a “massive design flaw.”

1/Yesterday #Solana had another 20 hour outage 🤯

Just one of about a dozen times the ⛓️ has gone down. But why? 🤔

All part of a massive design flaw that I will try to break down in this 🧵

So let’s get into it… pic.twitter.com/KmeUPnnlZJ

— DBCryptoX ⚡️ (@DBCrypt0) February 26, 2023

The Twitter thread reached more than half a million people, which prompted a response from Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. 

On-chain voting is congesting the network

According to DBCryptoX, Solana handled its consensus on-chain, which essentially meant that all validator communications were on-chain as a transaction, which leads to inflated transaction volume and transactions per second (TPS). DBCryptoX stated that the millions of validator messages were bogging down the system, which eventually led to the outage. 

As for the reason behind the long duration of the network outage, he revealed that when the chain goes down, all communication between validators ceases. This leads to off-chain communication on discord servers, but the varying time zones of the network’s validators makes it impossible to have consensus available at all times. 

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko responded to these claims in a tweet earlier today. He revealed that the network’s BFT consensus required quadratic messaging overhead, meaning the more nodes in the same quorum, the more messages the network had to handle. According to him, Solana’s 2800 node quorum allows for high security, low latency performance, and exceptional levels of security. 

Why are votes transactions? Every thread that I've seen that talks about this comes form pure ignorance.

Classic BFT consensus requires quadratic messaging overhead.

The more nodes you have in the same quorum, the part of the network that agrees on the state, the more messages… https://t.co/8lOhICb8mn

— toly 🇺🇸 (@aeyakovenko) February 27, 2023

Yakovenko stated that Solana implements votes as transactions because there is no cheaper way to do it. This optimized pipeline is reportedly used for all other messages that require full replication of all nodes to ensure security. He further claimed that other networks with smaller quorums and longer consensus rounds couldn’t provide the same level of security and performance as Solana.