Solana is superfast and users can interact on its blockchain for ultra-low fees. Perhaps this is the reason why NFT marketplace like MagicEden are so successful despite a crushing bear market that often leaves investors wondering if there is ever going to be a bottom formation for crypto. Solana has a long history of hiccups and some are considered to be outright unacceptable by critics.

Solana broke down last weekend for the eighth time in its history. Why did this happen and how will this affect its future?

Solana is still running as a beta version

What you have to keep in mind when looking at Solana is that the project is still considered to be a beta version. This means that the software comes with a disclaimer that it is still far from being ripe for a final and stable release.

Critics are often pointing out the fact that such a disclaimer is set in place to limit liabilities for the developers since it is very common in the DeFi space. Their point is that most of the software could be considered to be highly experimental and the label “beta status” isn’t very helpful to give users and investors an idea of how stable a protocol, an application or a blockchain really is.

With that being said, Solana is using a unique approach to achieve the speed of its blockchain. The current theoretical limit is 65.000 transactions per second. However, Solana is achieving about 3.000 transactions per second on average under the current circumstances.

The blockchain went down again

Last Friday, the whole blockchain went down again. Apparently, a single error took down the whole network. Again, developers came up with a fix within a few hours and instructed validators to restart Solana.

This was the fourth incident in 2022 and the eighth incident in Solana’s history. Many other communities are ridiculing the project for this long track record of failure. One is well advised to remember that Solana is still one of the fastest products out there. Many other blockchains currently active in the same field realize speed and scalability either over layer-2 protocols or sidechains. Solana does all this with on-chain transactions which means that it is still an incredible consensus layer.

It might take years until all hiccups are removed, and Solana is going to become a stable blockchain. The crucial point is that its technology is trying to achieve highly ambitious goals. In this context, it is not as important that it fails frequently but that these problems occur early and are considered for future development.