On September 14, 2021, the Solana network experienced a major outage that lasted over 17 hours, leaving $ 11 billion worth of investor money stuck in the balance.
Solana, one of the most famous blockchains, upset the entire cryptocurrency community, and the debates about centralized versus decentralized systems and PoW network versus PoS systems resurfaced.
The failure of the Solana network
Solana released a preliminary investigation report into the outage on September 20, entitled “9-14 Network Outage Initial Overview”. Service attack.
At 12:00 UTC, Grape Protocol launched its IDO on Raydium and bots generated transactions that flooded the network. These transactions resulted in a memory overflow that caused many validators to crash, forcing the network to slow down and eventually stall. ”
Solana claims its network can handle 710,000 TPS; However, the network failure and resource exhaustion occurred when the network reached a load of 400,000 TPS.
Solana combines the proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – PoS for short – with a new type of proof-of-history or PoH system. During the outage, the network went offline when the validator network could not agree on the current state of the blockchain, which prevented the network from confirming new blocks.
It is noteworthy that this incident was not the first time in Solana’s history, as they had previously experienced a similar breakdown in December 2020.
The problem of centralization in the proof of stake
A look at the failure of Solana reveals two decisive aspects of systematic errors in the network: on the one hand, the exhaustion of resources and, on the other hand, the delay in the consensus between the validators to make a quick decision.
While the former represents the weakness of many digital infrastructures, the latter shows that despite the decentralization keys for the proof-of-stake blockchain, the power to make essential decisions is centralized with a few people. These aspects are among the most common weaknesses of PoS networks and the financial ecosystem that builds on them.
One of the driving factors behind cryptocurrency is the fact that it is decentralized. This means that no individual or group controls it. Instead, it is controlled by everyone who participates in the respective cryptocurrency network. The more people there are on the network, the more resilient it is to various types of attacks.
With proof-of-stake, a person’s chance of receiving a ban depends on how much stake the person owns in the network. The PoS system favors companies with a higher number of tokens over those with lower amounts. This means that more significant stakeholders end up with higher profit margins and, if proceeded rationally, would keep their coins to increase production capacity.
A major stakeholder therefore grows faster than a small stakeholder. At some point, the cost of participating in the mining operation would get too high, causing small interest groups to drop out and centralization.
Proof of work with scaling
Proof of Stake is a newer consensus mechanism created to solve the problems of an expensive mining setup, high energy consumption, and scalability issues of proof-of-work blockchains. However, the proof of stake carries a security risk as a handful of owners try to control a significant portion of the network currency. But what if there is a proof of work consensus system that can be easily scaled and is energy efficient at the same time?
The makers of Kadena have a solution for this; a PoW blockchain with scaling capabilities better than most PoS blockchains out there. Kadena is the fastest Layer 1 PoW blockchain today and uses a sharding solution capable of providing infrastructure-level performance for the DeFi economy.
They are the only project with a scalable proof of work, which means that the network can grow limitlessly without compromising security, while at the same time providing enough throughput for every possible application. This means that the IDO on Solana that caused the network failure could have been carried out on Kadena without any problems.
In fact, the capacity of the Kadena network is already large enough to handle the entire stock market on a daily basis without breaking a sweat.
Kadena’s scaling mechanics combined with their native smart contract language Pact can be used to create fast, secure and scalable blockchains. Applications developed on Kadena’s public blockchain can be easily and securely scaled, including Kadena’s protocol coin KDA (a smart contract of the pact).
Between Pact and its scalable blockchain network, Kadena is a protocol that can be used for any type of application, from NFTs to DeFi or Enterprise Blockchain.
Learn more about Kadena on social media and the web:
Website | Twitter | Telegram | Means | YouTube | Kadena.
Disclaimer of liability
All information contained on our website is published to the best of our knowledge and belief and only for general information purposes. All actions of the reader in relation to the information on our website are entirely at your own risk.
Comments are closed.