Fantom CEO defends Solana amid network woes

Fantom creator Andre Cronje has shown support for the Solana network, amid the recent transaction failures on the network. Cronje is considered one of the most influential thought leaders in decentralized finance (DeFi).
According to a post on the X social platform by the co-founder, some critics view the ongoing congestion as Solana’s flaw, yet it stems from the ecosystem’s rapid growth, which has increased demand for block space. Cronje stated that performance issues are technical challenges, not consensus mechanism flaws.
According to Dune Analytics, amid a surge in activity driven by the recent memecoin craze on Solana, approximately 75% of non-vote transactions failed on April 4. Yet, proponents argue the data is widely misunderstood.
Source: Santiago Roel Santos
Cronje referred to the Solana network as a victim of success. The uptick in transaction failures was followed by a recent uproar from Solana users on social media, who complained of failed transactions and a degraded user experience.
Meanwhile, other members of the community supported Cronje’s stance, stating that people often laud blockchain technology for its underlying principles and capabilities. However, when increased demand leads to temporary user experience issues, they tend to react negatively despite craving higher usage.
Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko expressed frustration, noting that addressing congestion bugs is more challenging than total liveness failure. While the latter requires identification and patching, congestion bugs entail a lengthy testing process and releasing updates, hindering rapid deployment.
This is not the first time Solana has gone down. Solana suffered a significant outage in early February 2024. Downtime in block production on its mainnet halted the network’s block progression for over five hours.
Since January 2022, Solana has seen around half a dozen significant outages and 15 partial or primary outage days. Solana-focused software development firm Anza released a postmortem report of the recent outage on Feb. 9.
The report revealed that Solana’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache, which compiles all programs before executing a transaction, encountered a bug. Austin Federa, Solana Foundation’s strategy head told Cointelegraph of plans to replace the old loader system with a new one, set to deactivate upon update rollout.
The price of Solana’s
SOL
$175
has fallen around 3% in the last week, stumbling slightly after a 45% rally in the previous month. Its recent weekly drawdown has seen it fall back to being the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, per CoinGecko data. at $89 billion.