The ability for a select few validators to restart an entire network highlights Solana’s centralisation issues.
Being able to simply restart the mainnet in this fashion, certainly highlights the fact that Solana (SOL) is not decentralised.
We have previously spoken about the fact that when it comes to decentralisation, nothing is black and white and I’d like to kick off by reiterating that point.
When it comes to different consensus algorithms and distributions, there is always going to be tradeoffs between security and performance.
Solana’s network capabilities with a tight-knit group of team run consensus validators holding the vast majority of SOL supply in circulation, is the perfect example of this.
Which side of this divide you sit on will most likely decide whether you agree with the call that Solana is not decentralised.
Let’s go into a little more detail around what caused the network to restart and what this means for Solana as a decentralised blockchain going forward.
Solana restarts its mainnet network
In the early hours of Wednesday morning earlier this week, Solana network validators restarted the Solana mainnet.
The Solana Foundation attributed the outage to a flood of transactions that overwhelmed the network yesterday.
Adding that engineers on the network could not stabilise Solana in time.
The statement read:
“Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 [transactions per second].”
“These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and the lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.”
This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline.”
For many within the Solana community however, this rhetoric was not enough to make up for the blow to price.
The last time we took a look at the Solana chart, the bulls were large and in charge with price breaking $100.
But as you can see on the updated SOL daily chart below, those days are looking more like a distant memory.
Yeah, not ideal.
Solana is centralised
Ultimately, what this shows us is that Solana is not decentralised at all.
Seriously though...
If you can just shut it down all day for maintenance by a select group of validators linked to the original team, it certainly isn’t very decentralised.
At this stage, Solana could just get rid of the blockchain aspect to their network and just use a database.
It would certainly be more efficient.
When it comes to Solana’s centralisation, I’ll leave you with the following.
Can the Hive community be critical of the way Steem’s consensus witnesses are all linked to Justin Sun, but be okay with Solana’s level of centralisation?
An interesting one for the comments section I’m sure.
Best of probabilities to you.
Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.
Why not leave a comment and share your thoughts on the Solana network being centralised within the comments section below? All comments that add something to the discussion will be upvoted.
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