On-chain Voting Causes Network Failures, Says Solana CEO
Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder and CEO of Solana Labs, said that claims that on-chain voting caused Solana’s network outages came from “pure ignorance.”
Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana Labs’ founder and CEO, denied that a large amount of validator messages and its on-chain voting technology clogged its consensus layer causing network failures.
In a post on February 27, the Solana Foundation confirmed that the “root cause” of the recent 20-hour network outage is still not clear. However, the CEO responded to rumors that Solana’s decision to include on-chain votes as transactions is a “massive design flaw” that has caused many network outages.
A Twitter user named DBCryptoX posted the controversial thread on Feb. 27, 27 days after Solana’s 20-hour network outage. The thread suggested that the high number of validator messages and on-chain votes were clogging up the network.
In a response Tweet 20 minutes later, Yankovenko said that the theory was based on “pure ignorance.”
In short, he said that the votes, which are part of a “single giant quorum,” help to provide a “exceptional level of security, high throughput, and low fees” at the same time.
Why are votes transactions? Every thread that I've seen that talks about this comes form pure ignorance.
But Yakovenko didn’t really dispute DBCryptoX’s claim that 90–95% of Solana transactions are validator messages and on-chain votes, which DBCryptoX says has helped “bog down the system.”
DBCryptoX also said that the network outages lasted for 20 hours because it takes validators a long time to meet and come to an agreement (and therefore a solution) using off-chain methods like a messaging system like Discord.
People who commented on DBCryptoX’s first post also didn’t seem to agree with the theory.
Alex Kroeger, a software engineer at Solana-powered Wallet Phantom, said that there is probably no single reason for the network outages and that validators in proof-of-stake systems need to talk to each other a lot in order to validate.
Even though the network was officially turned back on at the end of February 25, it seems like people in the cryptocurrency community are getting tired of Solana’s frequent network outages.
