What to do when your decentralized, scalable, performant blockchain turns out to be not so scalable, sort-of-centralized and not so performant?
Crypto’s selling point is robustness that is built on decentralization. No single points of failures should mean no downtime right? Right?
Turns out, crypto’s weaknesses are same as those of other, more mundane technologies. Bad code, bad actors and the fact that building scalable, distributed (and decentralized) systems is hard!
Solana, a Layer 1 blockchain, suffered a long outage over the weekend. This happened when the crypto markets are melting down..
Solana is supposed to be the answer to Ethereum’s performance and scalability issues. And yet, Solana has been plagued by performance issues and outages over the last few months.
This weekend’s issue was caused by “program cache exhaustion” due to “excessive duplicate transactions”. Solana developers released an emergency patch to resolve this issue and begged every validator to upgrade.
Where there is code, there are bugs..
Welcome to the brave new world, where the problems are the same as the ones in the old world. They just cost you a lot of funny money.