The Solana Blockchain is one of the emerging projects in the crypto market. Within a few months, Solana got one of the most popular blockchains, and Solana’s SOL token entered the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. But there are always big concerns at Solana about the security of the blockchain. Does the blockchain have a problem with its security?
In this article we will discuss the security aspect of the Solana blockchain and see if the problems of Solana can be solved for the future or if the project can be damaged more.
What is Solana?
Solana is a blockchain project and a blockchain that was developed in 2021 and became one of the most successful projects on the market within a short time. The Solana blockchain uses smart contracts and can thus be the basis of decentralized applications. The big advantage of Solana is the extremely high transaction speed and thus high scalability.
The special feature of the Solana blockchain is the proof-of-history consensus mechanism. This ensures that transactions can be executed much faster. This ensures the extreme speed at Solana. Solana’s network token is called SOL.
Why did Solana become so popular so quickly?
The Solana blockchain experienced rapid growth and a rapidly increasing popularity in 2021. Already in the fourth quarter of 2021, SOL was one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Within a few months, Solana became one of the most exciting and popular projects on the crypto market.
The popularity of Solana was primarily due to the massive scalability and high transaction speeds of the Solana blockchain. As a result, Solana was one of the most popular blockchain used for the development of dApps within a very short time. Due to the high scalability, many projects chose the Solana blockchain as the basis for their decentralized applications.
Especially in the field of NFTs, Solana became the number 2 behind the Ethereum blockchain in 2021. Solana NFTs are rapidly increasing in popularity. The collection of the “Degenerated Apes” experienced an extreme hype, which at that time caused the price of the SOL token to rise massively. But at the same time, problems with the safety of Solana arose during this period.
What about the safety of Solana?
In the field of smart contract blockchains, the Ethereum blockchain is the absolute pioneer. Ethereum dominates the NFTs and decentralized finance industries by a wide margin. But Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin coined the term of Blockchain Trilemmas.
The Blockchain Trilemma describes a possible, but difficult to realize coexistence between 3 different pillars of a blockchain: Scalability, decentralization and security. The solution of this trilemma is one of the biggest challenges for the developers of a blockchain. Solana seemed to solve this problem, uniting all 3 areas.
But the aspect of security came to the fore again and again in 2021. The reason was several network crashes at Solana within a few weeks. These arose due to the overload of the blockchain due to an excessive transaction load. Often, users could not access their tokens for hours. Despite the non-existent losses of user tokens, there was a lot of criticism about the security and functionality of Solana.
Is proof-of-history secure and reliable?
The consensus mechanism of Solana, the proof-of-history, advised the center of criticism. This is a variation of proof-of-stake. This offers a massive advantage in the speed of validation of transactions due to several variations. However, this also brings problems.
During the failures of the network, we could see that a massive transaction load brought Solana’s consensus mechanism to its knees. Furthermore, proof-of-history is a deterministic consensus mechanism compared to other consensus mechanisms that are non-deterministic.
The non-deterministic block creation could lead to more security and censorship resistance. Because no one can tell who is creating the next block. This is not the case with Solana and could directly affect the security of the blockchain. It’s easier to attack the next blocker creator. A DDOS attack does not have to attack the entire network, but only the next 100 validators.
Can Solana get a handle on his safety?
An argument for the Solana Blockchain as an extraordinary project has always been the solution of the blockchain trilemma. However, as stated earlier, there are big question marks behind the security of the Solana blockchain. At the end of April 2022, the seventh system crash of the Solana blockchain occurred within a few months.
Furthermore, Solana advertises its blockchain with the high transaction speed of 50,000 transactions per second. In reality, the speed of Solana is much lower. The real speed of Solana is only 1,300 transactions per second. But this is still far above the speed of Ethereum (14 transactions per second). Furthermore, the cost of transactions on Ethereum is much higher.
Therefore, Solana could be a strong competitor for Ethereum if the blockchain can get its security problems under control. On the other hand, we might not have seen the biggest problems with Solana in the area of security in reality at all. Solana may have to pay for the high scalability with security losses.
Can Solana stay at the top for the next few months?
The Solana blockchain was considered a great hope in 2021. The hype around Solana NFTs caused a massive increase in the value of the SOL token. In the bull market, the failures of the network did not yet throw back the price of SOL so much. But the frequent repetition of the crashes and the facts about the consensus mechanism make more and more investors doubt Solana.
If Solana wants to remain at the top, it should address these performance and security issues in the future. Within the current bear market, it is very possible that Solana will decline against other cryptocurrencies and will no longer be in such a good position for the next bull market.
