Solana CEO Refutes Allegations That On-Chain Voting Caused Network Disruptions

Solana, a blockchain platform that promotes minimal costs and fast throughput, has faced scrutiny recently for a string of interruptions that have made some question its stability.

Solana’s founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, has stated that the platform’s unique approach to security and performance led to the outages experienced by the system rather than a fault within the system.

Why are votes transactions? Every thread that I've seen that talks about this comes form pure ignorance.

Classic BFT consensus requires quadratic messaging overhead.

The more nodes you have in the same quorum, the part of the network that agrees on the state, the more messages… https://t.co/fNe0Bji7rx

— toly 🇺🇸| bip-420 (@aeyakovenko) February 27, 2023

Solana’s architecture and consensus mechanism aim to achieve high throughput and low latency, focusing on scalability and decentralization. However, this emphasis on performance also resulted in high network congestion, leading to outages.

Despite this setback, Solana remains committed to its innovative approach and continues to work towards improving its technology.

An entrepreneur and content creator named DBCryptoX tweeted that Solana had gone down for a second 20-hour period, creating the conversation. DBCryptoX criticized the design problem responsible for the outages. It was simply one of almost a dozen instances when the platform had crashed.

Then why is Solana one of the only ones tracking and counting them? 🤔

— DBCrypto⚡️ (@DBCrypt0) February 27, 2023

In response, Yakovenko clarified that the outages were caused by the platform’s requirement for intensive network contact for validation, not design issues.

He described how the current Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus process requires a quadratic rise in communications costs. When a quorum’s size increases, the network has to deal with a larger volume of data.

Solana’s Use Of Transactional Votes: An Explanation

Solana has developed a quorum of 2800 nodes to handle the heavy network connection demand. Any remaining 2650 nodes will quickly see the problem. This is if the 66% quorum, which consists of 150 nodes, tries to make an invalid state transition or conceal information from the network.

According to Yakovenko, the massive quorum and quick block times are typically beneficial, offering consumers strong security and throughput with negligible latency. However, since the system needs 9 million messages, Solana has implemented a highly effective pipeline to manage all the votes.

Because of this, votes are counted as transactions and executed as transactions. This is because there is no cheaper way to obtain votes from every node in the network. All communications that must be replicated to all nodes are performed by Solana using a single, highly efficient pipeline.

Some networks, Yakovenko underlined, provide higher security or performance because of their limited quorums and rapid consensus rounds. Solana’s innovative strategy enables it to simultaneously offer outstanding protection, high throughput, and reasonable costs.

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But Yakovenko’s description of Solana’s distinct strategy for security and performance sheds light on the platform’s design and the causes of its previous failures.

A platform to monitor in the upcoming months. This also shows the platform’s ability to offer excellent levels of security, fast throughput, and reasonable costs.