How can Solana compete with Ethereum with two outages in a month?

Solana, which prides itself on high performance, is down again.

According to Solana Status’ tweet, the Solana mainnet went down again around 0:30 this morning and stopped producing new blocks because there was an error in the blockchain’s persistent random number function, causing some networks to believe that the block was invalid and unable to reach a consensus. At around 5 a.m., the Solana mainnet validators worked together to restart the Solana network, disabling the persistent random number function, and block production has now resumed.

In recent years, Solana has become increasingly popular in the NFT and DeFi ecosystem because it is cheaper and faster to use than Ethereum. According to its website, its blockchain processes 50,000 transactions per second, with an average cost of $0.00025 per transaction. Ethereum can only process about 13 transactions per second, and transaction fees are much more expensive than Solana. However, Solana, known as the "Ethereum Killer", has experienced several network outages and failures in the past year.

On May 27, the Solana network was experiencing a half-hour lag in on-chain time compared to real-world time due to slower slot times. While this issue did not affect network operations, it could result in a reduction in staking rewards.

On May 1, Solana Mainnet Beta stopped producing blocks at 05:00 on the same day, and the network was interrupted for about 7 hours. The cause of the downtime was the crawler of its Candy Machine program. Last September, Solana was down for 17 hours due to insufficient validator memory; in December last year and January this year, it suffered DDoS attacks, resulting in network congestion.

Crypto user @CryptoWhale commented: “The ‘decentralized’ Solana network has been shut down by developers for the 8th time this year. What a joke!”

Insufficient network performance and stability have begun to put Solana at a disadvantage in the competition among public chains. According to defillama data, Solana has only 67 on-chain protocols, which is a certain gap from Ethereum, BSC, Avalanche, and relatively lower-ranked Polygon and Fantom. In terms of TVL, Solana ranks fifth among public chains with a total locked volume of US$3.84 billion.

In addition, according to tokenterminal data, Solana's overall efficiency does not look very high. Although sales have also increased significantly, there is a key difference from Ethereum. For Solana, protocol revenue accounts for only 50%. For Ethereum, it accounts for 80-90%, and Ethereum can significantly increase protocol revenue.

Solana Protocol Revenue vs. Miner Revenue

Ethereum protocol revenue vs. miner revenue

From the perspective of the secondary market, although the crypto market continues to fluctuate and fall, BTC has fallen 57% from its historical high and ETH has fallen 63% from its historical high, but Solana has fallen more than 12% in the last 24 hours, down 85% from its historical high.