Co-founder of Solana discusses the trustworthiness of the blockchain

Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, stated that the ten partial or complete outages and lengthy block times that the blockchain experienced in 2022 are not the experience that they want to deliver.

Yakovenko claims that while network outages and reliability problems plagued the network over the past year, recent updates will help the blockchain’s reliability problems.

On November 5, Yakovenko spoke about the blockchain’s past and future in Lisbon, Portugal, at the Breakpoint 2022 annual conference, pointing out challenges the network has recently faced.

He said, “We’ve had a lot of challenges over the last year, I would say this whole last year has been all about reliability.”

According to its own status reporting, Solana has experienced ten partial or full outages. The most notable of these occurred between January 6 and 12, 2022, when the network was plagued by problems that resulted in partial outages and performance degradation for between 8 and 18 hours.

The most recent occurred on October 1 and was referred to as a “major outage” lasting nearly six and a half hours.

Due to longer than usual slot times (also known as block times), the window of time during which a validator can send a block to Solana, the blockchain’s time was off from real-world time between late May and early June.

The ideal slot time for Solana is 400 ms, but Yakovenko claimed that “things got really really bad in June, block times went up to over a second, which is really slow for Solana,” adding that in some cases “confirmation times so we’re taking 15 to 20 seconds.”

After a recent update and the validator count doubling over the previous year, according to Yakovenko, Solana is on the right track to resolving the network performance issues.