It appears that the Solana blockchain is having a rough week, as it has faced yet another network performance degradation incident for the second time this week. According to the blockchain, this failure occurs due to the increase of high compute transactions.
Because of these transactions, the network capacity decreased to only several thousand transactions per second (TPS) from the original 50,000 TPS. Solana claimed this to be the primary reason users’ transactions failed this week. However, the network assures us that its team of developers is already in the process of fixing these issues.
This latest issue happened only a couple of days after a similar occurrence on Tuesday, where users had experienced the same issues. The community theorizes that the initial incident from Tuesday was because of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. However, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko disputed these claims on Twitter by saying that it’s only the “pain of getting a new runtime commercialized.”
On a related note, Justin Bons, the chief investment officer of Cyber Capital, expressed that he disapproves of Solana. In the middle of the network’s recent issues, he sent out a thread of tweets explaining why he doesn’t support Solana. According to Bons, Solana continuously shows a “pattern of bad behavior” and “prioritizing attracting ignorant investors over good blockchain design.”
Other than that, Bons also criticized Solana’s level of security, noting that DDoS attacks aren’t the only thing the network is concerned about. He adds that DDoS can be merged with a 51% attack. As such, attackers can acquire “proportional-staked control over the network” by striking at the other stakeholders, albeit temporarily.
However, Yakovenko disregarded Bons’ criticisms by saying this was only “exhausting nonsense” and that “it’s impossible to DDoS a private key.”
A DDoS attack in the Solana network last year caused a similar effect that degraded its performance. Austin Federa, the head of communications for Solana Labs, explained that the outage occurred after several transactions in the middle of an initial DEX offering “landed in a Solana block” and it took a massive amount of “compute power.”
