On September 14, the Solana mainnet suffered from a significant outage that saw transactions halted for several hours.
The official Solana Twitter account attributed this to resource exhaustion- largely due to a bot flooding the blockchain, with the network reaching over 400,000 TPS. However, the outage whipped up a social media storm concerning Solana’s centralisation.
Here’s how the crypto community reacted to Solana’s network issues.
Solana Hit With Centralisation Claims
Following the blockchain issues, one user created a post on the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit that stated: “After the bug, [the] team shut the network down themselves. 100% centralised.”
The post, which has over 14,500 upvotes at the time of writing, received 4,200 comments.
The most-upvoted comment further hit out at Solana for centralisation. The user said:
LOL a blockchain that can shutdown itself. More like a central bank running on SQL.
Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Ethereum and creator of Polkadot, also noted the downsides of Solana’s network setup.
Other users took a different angle, mocking Solana as the Ethereum Killer that “killed itself.”
Is It FUD?
However, not all cryptocurrency enthusiasts had the same reaction.
Commenting on the original r/CryptoCurrency post, one user dismissed centralisation claims, stating:
Large number of nodes crashed due to bug, no consensus means Solana stopped. There was no concerted effort to shut it down.
Users on the r/Solana subreddit dismissed these centralisation claims as ‘FUD’ – or Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt’.
“Solana has definite issues with coin distribution, but saying the network is “centralized” is a disingenuous attack I usually hear from Eth or Ada maxis,” said one commenter.
In one explanation, a user stated:
It's fair to say that Solana is more centralized than Ethereum. However, saying the foundation has the ability to unilaterally shutdown the network is simply false.
The network was disrupted by a third-party attack and just slowed down to 0. Some validators crashed on their own. Some validator managers may have also disconnected their own nodes. However, nobody at the foundation has the power to click a button and disconnect a node.
While Solana mainnet functionality has now been restored, it’s unlikely this will lead these groups of cryptocurrency enthusiasts to reach a consensus about Solana’s centralisation.
Read More: Solana Roadmap: What New Updates Are Coming To Solana?
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