Solana: the unstable blockchain

Solana is a major competitor to Ethereum blockchain. It's cheaper, and amazingly faster.

The problem: it's the most unstable blockchain of all and suffered many dramatic outages in 2022.

Reliability is the number one feature of a blockchain. With all the outages that occurred in 2022, you would have thought that the Solana team would do everything to restore confidence in their chain and prevent any new issue.

Well ...

25/02/2023 Unwanted fork after software update

Solana Network Stumbles, on-chain trading slows after forking incident - Coindesk

What happened here? Well, after a Solana software update, the blockchain forked, meaning that two versions of the blockchain started to diverge from each other. RAM consumption exploded in some validators and transaction processing almost stopped.

To solve the issue, validators had to downgrade their software, and as that was not enough, the whole chain was halted, and restarted from a block in the past that was prior to the unwanted fork. All transactions that had taken place after that block where simply removed from history.

Not so good.

26/02/2023 Solana, still in deep sh*t

Solana Validators to make second restart attempt as transaction freeze drags on - Coindesk.

Basically, validators still don't exactly know why transactions are frozen. The chain is almost halted and validators struggle to reach the 80% super majority needed to make the whole blockchain work correctly again.

Conclusion

You want a cheap, fast and reliable blockchain? Just use Fantom.