Solana Co-Founder Clarifies No Network Failure or DDoS Attack

Multiple reports have said that Solana experienced a network outage and DDoS this month. However, co-founder Raj Gokal claims that neither was the case and that the NFT game SolChicks was responsible for the low performance.

The Solana network suffered from heavy network congestion, leading to many unwarranted claims that the network had gone down. The crypto community has begun roundly criticizing the network, which has experienced shutdowns in the past. However, co-founder Raj Gokal clarified that the network did not go down and that there was no DDoS attack earlier this month.

There have been multiple reports saying that the network shutdown, but in actual fact, the network experienced a temporary performance drop. Some users found that the network was slower for a day, with some transactions being dropped.

SolChicks said that its Chicks NFT series caused the network to experience performance issues. Tens of thousands of people have been trying to buy CHICKS, causing Solana’s Raydium DEX to crash.

Users on Reddit talked about a large amount of trading on Raydium for the CHICKS NFTs. They noted that there was a history of heavy activity and hype behind the project, which actually forced Telegram to shut off the group as it was affecting Telegram’s servers.

Critics have mislabelled the incident as a shutdown. Rather, the network performance dropped to about 1,000 transactions per second because of the SolChicks IDO. They are still criticizing Solana, of course, which boasts a potential transaction throughput of 50,000 TPS.

All of this has led to some market enthusiasts criticizing Solana not being decentralized enough. This criticism has been going on for some time. Polkadot founder Gavin Wood said in September 2021 that decentralization was more important than throughput — which some in the community took as a shot at Solana.

Solana marching forward despite incidents

It’s true that Solana has had a few negative incidents concerning its network this year. In September 2021, the network went down and the developers had to restart the mainnet beta. The outage lasted for over 17 hours and caused the price of SOL to drop.

Despite these occurrences, Solana has been doing well on the whole. Its ecosystem has been growing, and the Phantom Wallet hit one million active users in early November. Institutional investors are also showing more interest in the asset, with Grayscale launching a Solana Trust for institutional and high net worth investors.

The team and investors behind Solana are optimistic about the future. Kyle Samani, the founder of Solana ecosystem lead investor Multicoin Capital, said that he expected a flippening in the medium term. Consequently, he expects altcoins to do well in the years to come.