Gavin Wood Criticizes Solana Following Blockchain Downtime

Gavin Wood, founder of Web3 Foundation which created Polkadot (DOT) and Kusama (KSM) has stated his opinion on the recent event that occurred on the Solana blockchain. The blockchain had suffered transaction overload on Tuesday leading to the forking of the network. In a Wednesday tweet, Gavin Wood highlighted the solutions to such problems to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

Solana was projected as a scaling solution for the rigidity of Ethereum blockchain which caused fees to skyrocket during periods of extreme traffic. However, it does seem like Solana has solved the challenge of high gas costs on Ethereum and not scalability. While Ethereum verifies transactions within 10 seconds, Solana is capable of confirming up to 65,000 transactions within a second. But on Tuesday, the latter tried to confirm 400,000 transactions per second which caused the network to crash.

Genuine Decentralization And Well-designed Security Core to a Better Blockchain

According to Gavin Wood, the capability of large transactions per second, the basis on which Solana claims to be better than Ethereum, may be a wrong criterion to determine the best blockchain after all. Wood noted that genuine decentralization and a well-designed security system were better determinants than the former. 

He threw a shade at Solana asserting that the blockchain may not be decentralized contrary to previous claims since nodes are operated from an ‘exclusive and closed set of servers.’ The computer scientist likened Solana to a bank because, in his words, it can’t run a full node on its own.

Dr. Wood’s concern is that the downtime issue was resolved in a centralized manner whereas Solana claims to be decentralized. Attempts by engineers to resolve the issue were futile until validators decided to restart the network. Dr. Wood argued that the capability of higher throughput should not be achieved with centralization being a core part.

Network Goes Live Again, Price of $SOL Rebounds 

As of press time, Solana Mainnet Beta had gone live again with activities back in full-scale. Still, restarting the network is likely not a lasting solution to the Tuesday downtime. Thus, Solana may experience such again. 

Solana’s native asset, $SOL recovered as well after falling to the depths of $141 on the same day. The price rebounded above $160 but is trading at a loss of 15% from it’s all-time high of $215. $SOL had impressively moved to the latter price mark after surging last week amid a significant market correction. 

The price surge on Solana is attributable to the increase in the use of the blockchain for activities relating to DeFi and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). DeFi and NFT enthusiasts are now resorting to cost-friendly blockchains as they try to escape the cut-throat gas costs on Ethereum which the recently-launched EIP-1559 has not been able to address.