Last weekend, Solana’s blockchain was offline for 20 hours.
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 Updated on 27 February 2023, that the cause of the 25-hour-long network outage on February 25, 2023 was still not known.

Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs, did however talk about the causes of the recent outage. Executive at Solana Labs dismissed According to claims, the network was clogged due to high volumes of validator messages and on-chain votes.

What are votes transactions? All threads I’ve seen about this topic are based on 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 dramatically reduce futures-outages

After being offline for 20 hours, Solana’s blockchain was able to be restarted successfully 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 expressed his opinions in a Comment to CoinJournal. He noted:

“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.”

His thoughts on what’s next are that the Solana Team will be more vigilant in their handling of 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 also prepares for a new consensus execution, which is expected to eliminate any single point of failure. That upgrade is by Jump’s Firedancer validator client. Tucker says it will increase network resilience and greatly reduce the likelihood of future outages.