This Tuesday, January 4, 2022, the Solana network has experienced a new very strong congestion of its blockchain network. However, Solana’s teams came to reassure (or not) its community, explaining that it was not an external attack, but an internal problem.
Problems of “degraded performance”, but no attack!
The Solana project has been experiencing some problems since the beginning of this year 2022. The first one started on January 4, when many users reported that they were unable to carry out transactions.
These disruptions made some people fear that the Solana blockchain was the victim of some kind of denial of service (DDoS) attack, consisting of saturating the network with transactions. But according to Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs (Solana’s main development team), it was actually a slowdown due to the deployment of a new runtime environment:
“This is not a DDoS attack, just a pain [on network load] caused by the release of a new runtime (…)”
A problem that drags on a little too long
If this incident had only lasted for a short time before resolving itself, we might not even be talking about it anymore. But the concern is that this degradation of transactions on the Solana blockchain has continued over the last few days.
Just this Thursday, January 6, Solana’s teams admitted that the network’s transactions per second (TPS) capabilities were still degraded, at a few thousand transactions per second, instead of the normal 50,000 or so TPS.
“The Solana network is currently experiencing performance degradation due to an increase in computationally complex transactions, which reduces the network capacity to [only] several thousand transactions per second. This is causing some transactions to fail for users.”
Of course, to reassure, officials end by explaining that developers in the Solana ecosystem are currently doing everything they can to resolve these issues.
The concern for Solana is that this new phase of user experience degradation is already the fourth in just one year. With the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) ecosystems growing at full speed on Solana, it may be worth considering the risk that these kinds of incidents could happen again.
