Unchained Unconfirmed: Solana's Outage Lasted 17 Hours. What Does This Mean for Decentralization? - Ep.273
Sep 17, 2021
Aidan Mott, a research analyst at Messari and an expert in blockchain technology, dives into the recent 17-hour outage of Solana's network. He reveals the triggers behind the disruption, including an IDO that flooded the system with transactions. The conversation examines how Solana's response compares to past outages on other blockchains and discusses the implications for decentralization. Mott also touches on potential vulnerabilities ahead and the challenges of validators running the same client, raising important questions about the network's resilience.
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Solana Outage Trigger
- Solana validators noticed misaligned blocks and a transaction influx on September 14th.
- This was linked to the Grape Protocol IDO hosted on Raydium, which triggered a surge in bot transactions.
Outage Length and Community Perception
- The 17-hour Solana outage was its longest, exceeding a prior 6-hour outage in December 2020.
- While significant, some within the Solana community considered this downtime somewhat acceptable due to Solana's 'beta' status.
Validator Response and Long-Term Concerns
- Validators quickly realized a restart was needed, a familiar procedure from past incidents and testnet practices.
- Long-term concerns remain about whether iterative patches can truly resolve the underlying consensus mechanism issues.