Solana Outage Sparks Concern About SOL Decentralization: Network Down Every Two Months, on Average

Key Takeaways

• Solana went down for 5 hours on Tuesday, breaking a 351-day streak of uptime.
• The network has now failed 11 times in 2 years.
• As long as most Solana validators are running the same software client, bugs will be able to cripple the network.
• However, Jump Crypto is currently developing an alternative client, Firedancer, that could help solve the problem.

The Solana network went down for 5 hours on Tuesday, February 6, marking its 11th unplanned outage in 2 years. 

With such events occurring every 2 months, on average, outages have become a recurring challenge for the Solana ecosystem. But is the issue perennial or can Solana overcome its downtime problem?

Solana Downtime: A Recurring Headache

Solana is one of the most popular Layer 1 blockchains, typically registering more daily users than both Bitcoin and Ethereum. What’s more, in terms of daily transaction count, the platform dominates, processing tens of millions of transactions each day and significantly outranking its peers. 

Of course, this makes it even more problematic when the network goes offline.

After a 351-day streak of continuous uptime, the more optimistic members of the Solana community had started to believe the issue was resolved. Unfortunately, those hopes came crashing down when Solana botched an upgrade on Tuesday, bringing the entire network grinding to a halt. 

What Caused the Solana Outage?

While the Solana Foundation has yet to publish a full postmortem of Tuesday’s crash, the issue appears to have been caused by a bug in Solana’s validator software. The issue was eventually solved after Solanana released a software patch, which was distributed among the network’s validators, prompting a full relaunch. 

Software bugs were also the root cause of a string of outages in 2022. Despite testing upgrades before their launch, in the live setting of a dynamic, distributed network of computers, undiscovered flaws in the validator client code can cause unforeseen challenges. 

Stability and Decentralization – Balancing Solana’s Tradeoffs

Unlike Ethereum, which at any one time is supported by nodes running 6 different consensus clients and 8 execution clients, Solana’s validators have only 3 to choose from, 2 of which share large amounts of code. 

What’s more, while Ethereum is on its way to a million validators, Solana is currently supported by just a few thousand.

For Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation, retaining a degree of centralized control over the network is both the cause and the solution to the downtime problem. 

Bugs can cause the blockchain to fail because more than 80%  of all validators are running the same client developed by Solana Labs, but when such failures do occur, having a centralized administrator orchestrate the relaunching of thousands of nodes is useful. 

Firedancer as a Solution to Solana Outages

Going forward, a new software client being developed by Jump Crypto could provide a potential fix to the issue.

Known as Firedancer, the alternative program will provide Solana validator nodes with a fourth software option to choose from, helping to reduce the network’s vulnerability to bugs, code exploits, and attacks.

Moreover, unlike existing alternatives which closely resemble the original software developed by Solana Labs, Jump Crypto has built Firedancer from the ground up.

As Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko explained in an interview last year, Firedancer essentially rewrites the Solana protocol in C and C++ rather than Rust. Because it uses entirely different languages, “when there’s a memory leak or something like that, that brought down the network, the probability of it being in both clients is virtually zero,” he said.

Discussing Solana’s recurring outages, Yakovenko said that having a new independent validator client will “basically give us the same reliability as we see in Ethereum today.”

About the Author

James Morales

Although his background is in crypto and FinTech news, these days, James likes to roam across CCN’s editorial breadth, focusing mostly on digital technology. Having always been fascinated by the latest innovations, he uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.

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