Solana’s co-founder addresses blockchain reliability at Breakpoint

Solana (SOL) co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says the past year has been marked by the network’s reliability issues and outages, but recent updates will help the blockchain address its reliability issues.

During the annual Breakpoint 2022 conference in Lisbon, Portugal on November 5, Yakovenko discussed the past and future of the blockchain, noting that the network has struggled over the past year:

“We’ve had a lot of challenges in the last year, I would say the whole last year has been about reliability.”

Solana has suffered ten partial or complete blackouts according to its own status reporting, the most notable of which occurred between 6 and 12 January 2022 with the network plagued with issues causing partial blackouts and reduced performance for between 8 and 18 hours. The most recent was what it called a “major outage” that lasted nearly six and a half hours on October 1.

Between late May and early June, Solana suffered from a clock drift, where blockchain time differed from real time due to longer than average times (also referred to as block times), the time interval in which a validator can send a block to Solana.

Usually, Solana’s ideal playing time is 400 milliseconds, but Yakovenko said that “things got really bad in June, block times went up to over a second, which is very slow for Solana,” adding in some cases “confirmation times, so we take 15 to 20 seconds.”

“That’s not the experience we want to deliver, and it’s a pretty bad Web2 experience when you’re competing with Google with Facebook with all these other applications.”

Yakovenko said after a recent update and doubling the number of validators in the last year puts Solana on the path to solving network performance issues, adding:

“[We’re] in a constant battle between performance, security, throughput and decentralization, all these issues […] every time you improve one, you can actually hurt some of the others, but I think we’ve done a fantastic job of solving a bunch of those.”

“Obviously we still have challenges with outages and failures,” he said, but the August partnership with Web3 development firm Jump Crypto to build Solana’s scaling solution called Firedancer — dubbed the long-term solution to the network outage problem — could be key.

Related: Solana unveils Google partnership, smartphones, Web3 store at Breakpoint

“Having a second implementation and a second client built by a different team with a completely separate codebase, the likelihood of the same type of bug existing in both is virtually zero.”