Reason behind Solana blockchain failure

 If you’ve been involved in the digital currency space for more than a few years, you’ve seen your fair share of hype cycles. From IOTA to EOS, to XRP, to Solana, there’s always a new killer blockchain that’s going to change everything. Speculators flock to them, pumping token prices by thousands of percent, but inevitably, it all comes crashing down or fades into insignificance as technical limitations come up against reality.

This year, Solana has been the main hype train in the digital currency space. Yet, some month ago, the Solana blockchain came to a grinding halt, the developers hit the off button, and the entire ecosystem froze in space and time as Solana devs tried to figure out what had gone wrong.

Like most events in this space, the large media outlets owned by the Digital Currency Group and others largely ignored it or downplayed its significance, and a stream of misinformation promoted by those who stand to gain from Solana’s token price remaining high flooded social media channels.

So, what really happened? Why did Solana implode? And what does it mean for its future?

What happened to the Solana blockchain?

According to an official Twitter statement from Solana Status, the network experienced an increase in transactions that peaked at 400k per second. These transactions allegedly flooded the transaction processing queue and caused the network to fork. In turn, the forking led to excessive memory consumption and knocked some nodes offline.

This is tech-speak for the blockchain crashed and burned because it couldn’t handle the heat and is poorly designed. So, what did the Solana validator community do? They turned it off and on again, just like what happens when you call tech support because your Wi-Fi isn’t working properly.

This raises serious questions about Solana’s key claims, namely that it is fast, secure, and censorship-resistant, some of the favorite buzzwords in the digital currency industry. If validators can switch the network off, in what way is Solana censorship resistant? And how can it claim to be secure when a large number of transactions caused it to fail spectacularly?

Yet, it’s not even clear if Solana really did experience such a large volume of transactions. Justin Bons, founder of Cyber Capital, called Solana out on social media and claimed the large transaction volume explanation was a lie. According to Bons, the on-chain evidence does not support these claims.