Solana upgrade will slash future outages, expert says

Solana blockchain went offline for 20 hours last weekend.
Marinade Finance’s Brandon Tucker says upcoming updates will significantly reduce futures outages.
But technical and human errors remain a concern for crypto and users need to have this outlook “hard-wired into any risk profile.”

The Solana Foundation noted in an update on 27 February 2023 that the root cause of the 20-hour long network outage on 25 February was not yet clear.

However, Solana Labs co-founder & CEO Anatoly Yakovenko did talk about what had not caused the latest outage. The Solana Labs exec dismissed claims that the downtime was due to the clogging of the network as result of extremely high volume of on-chain votes and validator messages.

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

Solana updates to significantly reduce futures outages

After going offline for 20 hours, the Solana blockchain successfully restarted after two attempts.

While Solana’s many outages remain a blot on the blockchain, Brandon Tucker, the growth lead at liquid staking protocol Marinade Finance, says an upgrade to the system will significantly improve the SOL blockchain and “slash” future network freezes.

Tucker shared his views in a comment sent to CoinJournal, noting:

“Chain restarts are never welcome, but it’s not a major setback. Indeed, despite the furor, it’s a similar outage to the five others we’ve seen over the last 12-18 months. Ultimately, it’s good to see the validator community rally together on their own accord to initiate the updates and restart the chain in real time.”

Tucker opines that Solana’s push for throughput and decentralization is something no other chain is attempting, and that getting it right isn’t always straight. In his view, these goals are particularly difficult to achieve when the network is “already being used by more people than just about any other chain.”

Technical and human error are likely to happen, the Marinade developer acknowledged – especially after recent events around both Solana and the broader crypto ecosystem. Tucker believes this is something that investors should have “hard-wired into any risk profile.”

As for what happens next, he thinks the Solana team will be more diligent as they handle updates to the network.

“While the exact cause of the performance degradation is unknown at this time, the latest 1.14 update appears to be the issue. As a result, Solana should and will likely do even more due diligence during testing before rolling out these updates.”

Solana is also preparing for a new consensus implementation, expected to remove any would-be single point of failure. That upgrade is by Jump’s Firedancer validator client. Not only is it set to bolster network resilience, but according to Tucker, also greatly cut chances of future outages.