After Solana’s Co-Founder Said BTC Should Change Its Consensus Algo, Solana Mainnet Loses Consensus for 7 Hours

Solana’s Mainnet Loses Consensus for 7 Hours

• The Solana proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain network suffered another outage after a significant amount of transactions flooded the network. Solana’s PoS network has had difficulties in the past, as block production stalled for hours in mid-September 2021.
• Solana’s network outage was confirmed on Twitter. “Block production on Solana Mainnet Beta has halted. Validator operators should prepare for a restart in mb-validators on Discord,” the Twitter account called Solana Status said. “Validator operators across the ecosystem are working to finalize restart instructions for Mainnet Beta.”

• The outage on Saturday follows the statements made by one of the project’s co-founders, Anatoly Yakovenko, who said Bitcoin’s consensus algorithm should change to PoS. “If [Bitcoin] eventually doesn’t switch to proof-of-stake nobody is going to use it,” the Solana co-founder explained in an interview.
• During the outage, Yakovenko’s recent Bitcoin PoS commentary was mocked and one individual wrote: “Eventually if Solana doesn’t have consistent uptime, nobody is going to use it.”
• After seven hours, Solana Status updated the public about the downtime and a network restart. “Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 3:00 AM UTC, following a roughly 7-hour outage after the network failed to reach consensus,” the Twitter account wrote. “Network operators and dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours.”

• Solana’s development team had to issue cluster restart instructions and published a document about how to start the process. During the first week of January 2022, Solana’s development team formally acknowledged that “high compute transactions” were “reducing network capacity.”

Mainnet Beta Validators: Please follow the cluster restart instructions https://t.co/OSDKJZafeS

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) May 1, 2022

• While Solana has had issues with a flood of transactions and long-lasting outages, since January 3, 2009, Bitcoin (BTC) has a network uptime percentage rating of around 99.98734244113%.