Solana Will Improve Network Upgrades to Improve Stability

Solana Will Improve Network Upgrades to Improve Stability

Solana’s co-founder said last week’s 1.14 network update has raised concerns about maintaining stability during major updates.

By Shaurya Malwa

AccessTimeIconMar 1, 2023, at 1:17 p.m.

Updated Mar 1, 2023, at 9:00 p.m.

Solana is rising higher in the last 24 hours after sluggish transaction processing spiraled into a near-complete shutdown of activity on the protocol. The Solana Foundation says the root cause is “still unknown” and an investigation is underway. CoinDesk Managing Editor for Data and Tokens Danny Nelson discusses the latest developments.

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Solana Labs will make improvements to its software upgrade process to ensure network reliability and uptime, co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said on Tuesday.

“Delivering a fast, reliable, and scalable network in order to move toward a better, decentralized web remains a top priority,” Yakovenko said in a blog post. “The issues around last week’s 1.14 network update – which focused on improvements for speed and scale – made it clear how maintaining stability during these major updates remains a challenge.”

Yakovenko said last week’s 1.14 network update had raised concerns about maintaining stability during major updates.

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Prior to the 1.14 release, core engineers were working on fixing problems that were impacting the network’s speed and usability, such as invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions, and lack of fee markets, among other more technical issues. These issues were prioritized to improve user experience.

But following the latest release, core engineers plan to bring in additional external developers and auditors to test and find exploits. They will also form an adversarial team comprising almost a third of the Solana Labs core engineering team.

The core engineers will continue supporting external core engineers, including Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team, which is building a second validator client.

Additionally, core engineers plan to improve the restart process by making nodes automatically discover the latest confirmed slot and share the ledger with each other if it is missing. Solana Labs and third-party core engineering teams have been working to improve the network over the past year, with a focus on stability.

“For example, Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team is building a second validator client to increase the network’s throughput, efficiency, and resiliency. Mango DAO developers are focused on the tooling needed to build on Solana,” Yakovenko said.

The comments came following a lengthy weekend outage for the Solana blockchain. The problems that started as sluggish transaction processing spiraled into a near-complete shutdown of activity on Solana. Developers said Monday the reason for a network-wide outage over the weekend was still unclear but investigations are ongoing.

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Solana-Themed Storefronts Close Shop, Ending Experiment in IRL Blockchain Evangelism

Solana-Themed Storefronts Close Shop, Ending Experiment in IRL Blockchain Evangelism

Solana Spaces will close its New York City and Miami locations by the end of February.

By Danny Nelson

AccessTimeIconFeb 22, 2023 at 8:45 a.m.

Updated Feb 22, 2023, at 8:44 p.m.

SOCIAL: Solana Spaces (Solana)
(Solana Spaces)

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Solana Spaces, a company that used storefronts in New York City and Miami to pitch adoption of its namesake blockchain, said in a tweet Tuesday it will close its locations by the end of the month.

The startup reached “an inflection point” in the past two months and will pivot away from brick-and-mortar experiences and into non-fungible tokens (NFT), CEO Vibhu Norby said in the tweet. He indicated Solana Spaces will rebrand itself as DRiP, a boutique NFT distribution platform created by Norby, which he also promoted in his stores.

The closure comes seven months after Norby opened Solana Spaces’ first location in a glitzy mall in New York City’s Hudson Yards. Its staffers guided visitors through interactive stations that taught them how to get going on Solana, from setting up a crypto wallet to swapping tokens on a decentralized exchange. Norby later set up a second shop in Miami.

Some 60,000 total visitors came to the stores over six months and they completed 16,000 onboarding tutorials, according to a spokesperson for the Solana Foundation, which gave Norby a grant to help Solana Spaces launch. The spokesperson said the Foundation had no financial stake in the company.

Rather than selling a product, Solana Spaces pitched its storefront as an interactive billboard for crypto brands like FTX, Phantom, and Orca that paid for exposure to mainstream audiences. Their advertising dollars paid for Solana Spaces operations; when the FTX exchange imploded it shook the company, but Norby insisted Solana Spaces could still sustain itself using his so-called “retail-as-a-service” (RaaS) model.

Just over a year ago, Norby’s first attempt at RaaS, the tech gadget-focused store b8ta, closed its doors after failing to reach a deal with its landlords. Solana Spaces’ New York location inhabited a former b8ta storefront.

Norby said he closed Solana Spaces’ brick-and-mortar operations because the behind-the-scenes administrative operations proved too burdensome and the potential for growth was too small.

“It’s a little less about the economics and more about where I thought this was going in the future,” Norby said.

The company will continue building DRiP, the NFT distribution platform Norby said attracted tens of thousands of signups during Solana Spaces’ in-person run.

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Solana Market Cap Shrinks Below Litecoin in Protracted Descent

Solana Market Cap Shrinks Below Litecoin in Protracted Descent

The market cap of the popular proof-of-stake blockchain, Solana, slipped below that of the OG proof-of-work blockchain, Litecoin, according to Coingecko.

Once dubbed the “Ethereum Killer,” Solana’s SOL token began 2022 trading at $178.89, with a market capitalization of $55.09 billion in January 2022. Then came crypto winter, the merge that saw Ethereum—the once proof-of-work blockchain—switch to proof-of-stake, and the fallout from the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Now, SOL is currently trading at $11.91 with a current market cap of $4.32 billion, a 94.9% drop for the year.

Solana is a proof-of-stake layer-1 blockchain that allows developers to create decentralized applications, or dapps, and non-fungible tokens, better known as NFTs.

Contrast this with Litecoin, which began 2022 trading at $151.09 with a market capitalization of $10.47 billion. Fast forward to November 22, 2022, and Litecoin is trading at $69.36 with a market cap of $4.97 billion, a drop of 69.1%.

Solana and FTX timeline

Solana’s latest downturn began with the collapse of FTX. On November 14, days after FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, attention turned to the Solana Foundation exposure to the failed exchange—including approximately $1 million in cash or cash equivalents on FTX.com as of November 6, when FTX.com ceased to process withdrawals.

“This is less than 1% of Solana Foundation’s cash or cash equivalents and as such, the impact on Solana Foundation operations is negligible,” the Solana Foundation noted in a post.

But FTX held a considerable amount of SOL at the time of its collapse: $982 million worth of SOL on November 10, according to Forbes and the Financial Times.

“We’re not sure how much customer SOL was on FTX,” Solana Foundation’s head of communications, Austin Federa, told Decrypt. “But the Foundation had less than $1 million on FTX, Solana Labs had nothing.”

FTX, along with its founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, has long been associated with Solana, having participated in a $314 million fundraise by Solana Labs through Alameda Research.

Undeterred by the current downturn, the Solana community still rallies around the embattled blockchain and token. “Community resolve has been really strong, it’s a pleasure to watch,” Federa said.

“We launched in 2020 after markets crashed and the world went into lockdown—chewing glass is in our DNA, and we’ll get through together,” tweeted Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko on November 9, 2022.

In a case of “not aging well,” a tweet by the former billionaire has come back to haunt Bankman-Fried. On January 2021, he pledged to buy an investor’s entire SOL position when Solana was at $3 per coin. “Sell me all you want. Then go fuck off,” he said.

Nearly two years later, with FTX token FTT trading at $1.30 as of this writing, that investor—who goes by @CoinMamba on Twitter—had the last laugh.

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