Solana sleeping on the job
Over the past three years, Solana has seen more than 150 hours of outage; meme currencies are exacerbating the issue.
Similar to several purported “Ethereum killers,” the Solana blockchain has failed to meet any significant milestones in its promises.
Though the network has a history of recurring disruptions that are never entirely resolved, it is potentially fast and scalable. At full network capacity, it performs inadequately. Although it can handle 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), in practice it can handle up to 1,000 TPS with wait times of between 30 and 60 seconds.
Even while it’s impressive by blockchain standards, it doesn’t even come close to the speed that’s frequently touted, and it makes no sense given the constant network congestion.
Solana’s congestion difficulties
Due to the network’s high demand for meme coins, 75% of all non-vote SOL transactions were failing as of April. People began to complain about the worsened user experience on X. A spike in bot activity was primarily blamed for the high transaction failure rate, which is not exactly great news for the network.
Compared to other large chains, Solana has a far shorter history of frequent network outages. Two months before to its demise in April, on February 6, it experienced a five-hour outage. It went offline for an astounding 58 hours in January 2022. Since 2021 alone, there have been nine network disruptions on the network, totaling more than 150 hours of downtime.
Questionable is also Solana’s official uptime reporting, which is shown on its webpage and shows 100% uptime in months when customers and exchanges (like Coinbase) reported significant network disruptions. The chain’s most notable characteristic is network congestion. That matters on a blockchain when scalability and throughput are key features.
Uptime Performance
Solana’s primary USP is unquestionably its affordable prices. Out of all the major chains, it has the lowest fees. This is the reason why the network is overrun with bots and users. Furthermore, despite widespread predictions that the FTX scandal would bring to the complete collapse of the ecosystem, it bounced back rather nicely.
Retail investors will continue to find it appealing, especially as long as meme coins remain popular. It’s the simplest and least expensive approach to start a meme project, which will draw in a lot of users that want to 100x as well as bots. However, Solana must endure for an extended length of time without experiencing significant network disruptions in order to be regarded seriously. In terms of network stability, that is a generous baseline.
