The Solana blockchain has faced its second network performance degradation incident this week. According to Solana, this is happening because of a rise in high compute transactions.
As a result, the network capacity which was originally advertised to be 50,000 transactions per second (TPS) was reduced to several thousand TPS. Solana cited this as the reason why users experienced failed transactions and added that its developers are already working to fix the issues.
This latest network issue came only a few days after a similar incident on Jan 4, where users experienced the same problems. Many speculated that the Tuesday incident was due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, but Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko responded on Twitter saying that it’s just the “pain of getting a new runtime commercialized.”
Amid these recent events, Cyber Capital CIO Justin Bons expressed his disapproval with Solana and published a series of tweets enumerating the reasons why he doesn’t support the project. Bons claims that Solana is “consistently displaying a pattern of bad behavior” and “prioritizing attracting ignorant investors over good blockchain design.”
Bons also criticized the security of the network, mentioning that DDoS attacks are not the only concern. He says that DDoS can be combined with a 51% attack. With this, he claims that attackers can “temporarily gain proportional-staked control over the network by attacking other stakeholders.”
Yakovenko dismissed this as “exhausting nonsense,” stating “it's impossible to DDoS a private key.”
Related: Solana reportedly hit by DDoS attack, but network remains online
Last year, Solana was hit by a DDoS attack causing a similar effect and degrading the network’s performance. Solana Labs head of communications Austin Federa said that the outage came after a number of transactions during an IDO “landed in a Solana block that took an excessive amount of compute power.” “Compute for those kinds of transactions wasn’t properly metered by the network, and caused blocks to take much longer to process than the network expected,” Federa stated.
