Solana Labs founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said claims that Solana’s network outages were caused by on-chain voting were born out of "pure ignorance."
Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder and CEO of Solana Labs has downplayed claims that Solana’s network outages were being caused by a high volume of validator messages and its on-chain voting system clogging its consensus layer.
While the Solana Foundation confirmed in a Feb. 27 post that the “root cause” of the recent 20-hour network outage is still not clear, the CEO responded to speculation that Solana’s decision to include on-chain votes as transactions is a “massive design flaw” that has led to its many outages.
The controversial thread in question was posted by Twitter user DBCryptoX earlier on Feb. 27 days after Solana’s 20-hour network outage, suggesting that the high volume of validator messages and on-chain votes were clogging the network.
However, Yankovenko in a response Tweet some 20 minutes later called the theory as coming from “pure ignorance.”
In short, he explained that the votes — which are part of a “single giant quorum” — contribute to provide an “exceptional level of security and high throughput and low fees” simultaneously.
However, Yakovenko didn’t exactly refute DBCryptoX’s claim that 90-95% of transactions on Solana comprise these validator messages and on-chain votes, which, DBCryptoX suggests has helped “bog down the system.”
DBCryptoX also claimed that the network outages were last 20 hours because it takes considerable time for validators to meet and reach a consensus (and thus a solution) using off-chain means, such as a messaging system like Discord.
Commentators on DBCryptoX’s initial post also appear to have disagreed with the theory.
Software engineer Alex Kroeger of Solana-powered Wallet Phantom said that there is likely no singular cause of the network outages and that validators of proof-of-stake systems need a lot of network communication to achieve validation.
While the network officially restarted on late Feb. 25, it appears as though members of the cryptocurrency community are getting tired of the frequent network outages on Solana.
Cointelegraph reached out to Solana Labs for comment but didn’t receive a response by the time of publication.