Members of Solana’s validator community expressed concerns about reliability following some congestion on the blockchain on Thursday morning. The normally fast crypto blockchain slowed to a crawl after a still undiagnosed issue that spurred discussion of communication, centralization, and transparency at Solana Labs, the ecosystem’s critical stakeholder, CoinDesk wrote.
Ad hoc roundtable called
Tensions were high midday after validators joined an ad hoc roundtable. Solana typically processes over 2,000 transactions per second. In the morning, it was down to fewer than 500. However, that was still much better than Ethereum with its 15 per second, give or take.
The public roundtable video chat was attended by around 35 community members, among whom at least two Solana Labs engineers.
Solana ecosystem worth $12B
Validators are a crucial element of Solana’s ecosystem, which has been valued at just under $12 billion. More than 1,000 validators are the computing power behind this ecosystem, which is comprised of trading, lending, and other aspects of decentralized finance (DeFi). Only several validators attended Thursday’s discussion and they were anything but happy.
Brian Long, who called the roundtable, said:
All of the apps running on top of Solana are the customers of the validators, right? It’s just super urgent that we get this sorted out.
Past issues with Solana
In September, Solana experienced an 18-hour outage, which took a hard restart to resolve. Yesterday’s incident was nowhere near as bad, but it gave some validators an opportunity to share concerns with Solana Labs engineers.
They asked why Solana Labs has been so secretive about occurrences in the ecosystem, which is supposed to be decentralized. Solana Labs has played a crucial role in Solana’s development and continues to fuel its growth.
Dan Albert, executive director of the Solana Foundation, acknowledged that the stance toward sharing sensitive details has been conservative, adding:
The tech is hard and I want you guys, really invested community members, to continue to feel ownership and feel like you’re being engaged by the developers and those who are working behind the scenes.
Solana Labs engineer Will Hickey revealed there had been quite a bit of chaos behind the scenes. By yesterday evening, the slowdown had mostly resolved and the reasons for it did not emerge. Some stakeholders suggested experimenting with a new centralization layer that would possibly provide Solana Labs with greater insight into the network.
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