The year of 2021 has been one filled with challenges and hardships for Solana [SOL]. The network had been plagued with several outages, some even causing its native token SOL to take a double digit hit. SOL community members, too played an active role and were vocal in their criticism of Solana’s reliability issues.
So far, the network has managed to adopt some measures to limit their issues, but high traffic has emerged as another factor affecting its reliability. Where does this leave SOL then?
Solana’s history repeats itself
Speaking at the Breakpoint 2022 annual conference, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko addressed the community’s concerns. Furthermore, he recognized the need for corrective measures to restore the network’s reliability.
“We’ve had a lot of challenges over the last year, I would say this whole last year has been all about reliability.” Yakovenko said.
In line with the statement made by the co-founder, data from Solana’s official website showed several incidents of network outages and unstable network performance. Additionally, the most critical outages occurred in January, March, and June. More recently, an outage was reported on 14 September, following which the network was offline for roughly 17 hours.
Yakovenko further cited that the network’s increasing validator count and mentioned Firedancer, a validator client built by JumpCrypto Throughput and Reliability of the Network. The co-founder seemed confident that Firedancer would serve as a long term solution for Solana’s long-standing battle with reliability.
“Having a second implementation and a second client built by a different team with a fully separate code base, the probability of the same kind of bug existing in both is virtually zero.” he added.
Did SOL react to this?
According to CoinMarketCap, the outage on 1 June prompted SOL’s price to fall more than 13%. Similarly, the outage on 14 September caused the token to tank by 11.8%. Apart from the bad reputation that the network has for its reliability, the evident impact on its native token was yet another reason for Solana to ramp up its efforts to contain this chronic problem.
Other than the full fledged outages, the blockchain has also been a victim of various instances where the network performance significantly degraded. Furthermore, SOL’s recent performance can be described as rocky.
The token ranked #10 by market capitalization and started the month at $32.88. Its performance was quite stable till 5 November, when Google Cloud revealed its collaboration with Solana.
Hey @aeyakovenko ?
Should we tell our followers the big news?
— Google Cloud (@googlecloud) November 5, 2022
The company also confirmed that it was running a validator on the blockchain. This drove SOL to go from $30.74 to $38.75, a 25% gain within 24 hours. However, this gain was short lived as the token’s price then witnessed a correction to stand at $31.49.
