The sun dims again on Solana as the beset blockchain suffers another outage. Covered: Solana, Nodes, and Centralization 22 Kingmakers Solana, Nodes, and Centralization  Solana was offline for an entire day, yet again. Outages have plagued Solana in the last year, suffering numerous kinks resulting in downtime. Having “downtime”, where the network completely degrades, is […] The post Node Implode: Solana Breaks Again, Why it Matters appeared first on CryptosRus.

Node Implode: Solana Breaks Again, Why it Matters

The sun dims again on Solana as the beset blockchain suffers another outage.

Covered:

  • Solana, Nodes, and Centralization
  • 22 Kingmakers

Solana, Nodes, and Centralization 

Solana was offline for an entire day, yet again. Outages have plagued Solana in the last year, suffering numerous kinks resulting in downtime. Having “downtime”, where the network completely degrades, is seen as an immutable stain on a blockchain. Mainly because the fix requires totally centralized ‘lever pulling’. Now, it would be naive to think that any online protocol can stay up and running for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for infinity. Still, ask yourself: when was the last time Ethereum “broke?”

In essence, the underlying importance and value proposition of blockchain (and smart contract chains specifically) is its ability to be functionally useable anytime, anywhere, for anyone. If the network halts, access to your money and assets are then subject to “a fix.” This is a terrible place to be in. After all, consensus (block validation), which is the heart of blockchain, is merely a software program downloaded to your computer. You then spin up the software and become a participant to enforce the deterministic rules of the algorithm.

Nodes require specific hardware specs to participate. For a modern PoS chain, 8GB of RAM is the absolute floor you would need. This need elucidates the “work” required in proof-of-stake chain nodes (or validators) like those on Solana. With Solana, 128GB is required to participate in block approval. This is a significant barrier to entry and these stats are not trivial. The whole gambit of crypto as we know it is predicated on sustaining nodes from every corner of the globe. It is the most necessary prerequisite for true decentralization and functionality.

Simply put, nodes (validators) enforce the consensus rules. Without nodes from Tom, Dick, and Harry, blockchains become the abyss they’ve stared into, centralized corporate playthings. Why does this matter in the context of Solana? Their consensus, which allows the scalability needed for quick transactions, has deep flaws. Consequently, when it breaks from congestion, the nodes have to “reboot.” Then a “solution” is haphazardly forced on the validators from a centrally derived framework, e.g., the Solana dev team.

They [validators] then have to update their software and acquiesce to any upgrade, or the chain will remain degraded. This is the complete antithesis of decentralized consensus. It’s the equivalent of a call from corporate to the middle managers saying, “go ahead and implement this solution now.” This is why “hard-forks”, which are upgrades, are planned, debated, and voted on far in advance (think EIP 1559).  So what happened with SOL? It has been reported that the “validator community” of Solana coalesced on Discord to get the chain back up and running.

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22 Kingmakers

A Google doc “created by one of the validators on Discord restarted the chain.” As reported by Coindesk, these validators mulled whether to implement code that would censor the bots that flooded the network and caused the outage. “Some debated in the Discord whether such a move constituted censorship. Regardless, the change would only be effective if two-thirds of validators opted in.” Who sent the Google doc? How many validators were on Discord at the time? This is utterly sophomoric from a chain seeking to shape the future of finance.

While it was eventually fixed, Phantom wallet, the most popular Solana wallet, suffered as nodes tried to get back online. Beleaguered users hounded the Solana mentions on Twitter, livid that their money and transactions were stuck. It appears no one ‘lost’ money, though. The loss of funds was apparently mitigated by “validators working together getting snapshots of on-chain data, each taking 30 mins to download 20 GB of data.” To come back online and re-start the process of accepting transactions, validators needed 80% of the SOL stake (supply) onboard to approve the hard fork.

Considering the fact that you need ~46k SOL (plus 12 cores and 128GB RAM) to turn a profit from as a validator (node), it is obvious that the nodes on Solana are controlled by a super-minority of the stake. In fact, just 22 validators control more than 33% of the entire Solana stake. Solana admits that this kingmaker super-minority, ala the 22 validators, “could theoretically censor/halt the network if they colluded.” The thrust of the above analysis is to highlight a critical flaw: It requites the rubber-stamp of these 22 nodes to “re-start” the network. Your money is at their whim.

This logistical s**tshow of getting the network back online displays the indisputable and implacable trade-off Solana has made to make the chain fast. As it stands today, your money/crypto on Solana is subject to as many vectors for centralization as TradFi. This doesn’t mean the chain is bad, it means the chain is flawed. Because the chain is flawed, it breaks. Because it breaks, it must be fixed (hard-fork). Who fixes it? A ragtag ‘team’ of people, or, ‘validators’. That equates to…complete centralization. Maybe this is why Solana is stressing the chain is not “really” in mainnet, but in *beta* mainnet.

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