Solana has been recently considered to be a highly scalable decentralized blockchain developed with a very unique method of ordering transactions. Interestingly, the way it conducts its transactions improves the transaction throughout, to the point that it has been processing around 2,500 transactions every second. It also has claims of being able to process close to 50,000 transactions per second.
The power of the cheap transactions of this blockchain is felt when the time comes to pay the fees of the transaction, with users being able to move their funds on the network for a minute fraction of a cent. By comparison, any average transaction on the Bitcoin network demands a fee of $1.80, even after it dropped by around 58% this year. At the same time, the gas fee cost of Ethereum has an average cost of $22 and up for every transaction.
Solana Putting Quantity over Quality
Although Solana seems to be having quite a high transaction throughput, some have also suggested that the developers have gone on to prioritize scalability rather than security after the blockchain went through a 17-hour outage that required the collaboration of their engineers and around 1,000 validators to overcome.
The spokesperson from Solana attributed this outage to a denial-of-service attack that was aimed at an initial decentralized exchange offering. According to a post from the Foundation, botting activity went on to overwhelm the network with a transaction load of close to 400,000 per second, which crashed the validators of the blockchain after they ran out of money to pay for the transaction costs.
Even more recently, the blockchain was hit by another denial-of-service attack that made the network even slower. According to Austin Federa, the head of communications at Solana Labs, the recent outage came after quite a few transactions took place during an IDO.
