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On Tuesday, Solana suffered a network outage, just shy of a year since its last shutdown. The blockchain had to quickly get a new version out and notify its validators to upgrade to it and restart their systems before blocks could be produced again, resulting in downtime of roughly five hours. This was previously something that had happened regularly to the blockchain, but seemed to have been largely addressed over the past year.

Lucas, the CEO of Jito Labs, which builds infrastructure for Solana and staged a highly successful airdrop last year that helped rejuvenate the blockchain, joined Unchained to discuss what caused the outage, whether it’s something that builders on Solana should be concerned about for the future, recent improvements Solana has made to its technology, whether the implementation of Firedancer would have prevented this incident, and the promise of the Solana phone. 

Show highlights:

• What caused the Solana blockchain’s outage this week
• Whether Solana needs to have better quality control 
• Whether the halt of the network affects the builders in the space
• What recent developments in the infrastructure surrounding Solana give Lucas confidence in the network
• Whether the Firedancer client that’s now in development would have prevented this week’s outage
• The promise of the Solana phone
• Whether the network going down presents a setback for the Solana community in terms of recognition and momentum
• Whether financial companies will consider using Solana if these issues keep occurring

Thank you to our sponsors!

• Popcorn Network
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Guest

• Lucas Bruder, CEO of Jito Labs

Links

• Recent coverage of Unchained on Solana:
• Jupiter Founder Meow to Critics of JUP Airdrop: ‘Give Me a Break’
• Three Crypto Pioneers on Crypto’s Monolithic vs. Modular Debate
• Anatoly Yakovenko on Solana’s Astounding Recovery and Its Future Plans

Outage

• Unchained: Solana Back Online Again After Suffering 5-Hour Outage
• Matthew Sigel’s explanation for why the outage happened
• Mert’s tweet on how Solana prioritizes security over liveness
• CoinDesk: Can We All Stop Pretending That Solana Is in Beta?

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