$SOL: FTX CEO Defends Solana Against Criticisms of Its Network Performance

On Tuesday (January 25), billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who is the Co-Founder and CEO of crypto exchange FTX, publicly defended layer one blockchain Solana ($SOL) against criticisms of last weekend’s network performance issues.

As Decrypt reported yesterday, “while the Solana network hasn’t experienced a full outage since September’s extended downtime, it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing the last few months for the rising layer-1 blockchain.”

As you may remember on, on 14 September 2021, the Solana network was offline for 17 hours, and on 20 September 2021 Solana Foundation confirmed that this network outage was caused by a denial of service (DoS) attack:

“The cause of the network stall was, in effect, a denial of service attack. At 12:00 UTC, Grape Protocol launched their IDO on Raydium, and bots generated transactions which flooded the network. These transactions created a memory overflow, which caused many validators to crash forcing the network to slow down and eventually stall. The network went offline when the validator network could not come to agreement on the current state of the blockchain, which prevented the network from confirming new blocks.“

Well, last weekend, Solana mainnet (which it should be remember is still in the beta stage of its software development), had its more recent performance issues:

The Solana team went on to say:

• “Developers have made lots of progress on this, but the work is not complete. The last 24 hours have shown these systems need to be improved to meet the demands of users, and support the more complex transactions now common on the network.
• The current issue experienced by validators is due to excessive duplicate transactions. Engineers have just released 1.8.14, which will attempt to mitigate the worst effects of this issue.
• These forthcoming releases are aimed at improving the state of the network, with more improvements expected to roll out in the next 8-12 weeks. Many of these features are currently live on Testnet, where they are being rigorously tested.
• Release 1.8.14 is now…“

As The Block reported on January 23, one of the crypto traders complaining on social media platforms about Solana’s network congestion was Jim Greco

Entrepreneur and angel investor Joe McCann pointed out that the Solana team had managed to release a fix before Bloomberg News got a chance to report on the problem:

Solana Labs Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko sent out the following tweet to thank everyone who worked incredibly hard to resolve this issue so quickly:

Decrypt reported yesterday that in a report shared with them that day, Yakovenko wrote that last weekend Solana mainnet’s throughout “reached a recent average of 800 TPS, down from the typical mean above 3,000 TPS.” which created problems for users of the network trying to transfer funds or interacting with Solana DApps (such as NFT marketplaces).

He then admitted that Solana’s “user experience is not what it should be today” and blamed it on rapidly increasing demand from “sophisticated builders and users”:

“The network has not experienced any periods of downtime since September… Despite that, the user experience is not what it should be today… The network is experiencing growing pains as it onboards a new class of sophisticated builders and users.“

Earlier today, the FTX CEO, who is usually called SBF on Crypto Twitter, decided to share his thoughts on Solana’s recent performance issues.

SBF said that although it is true that there had been some performance degradation, the Solana blockchain @still processed more transactions than all other major blockchains.”

He then went on to say although “there’s more work to do”, it is “only by being ambitious” that we can “make progress” and “sometimes that means failing to hit our goals, but we still often end up further than if we’d never tried.”

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