Fantom CEO Stands Firm on Solana Amid Network Issues

Andre Cronje, the creator of Fantom, has expressed his support for the Solana network in light of recent transaction failures. Cronje is considered a prominent figure in decentralized finance (DeFi). He addressed criticisms that the ongoing congestion on Solana is a flaw of the network, arguing that it is a result of the ecosystem’s rapid growth and increased demand for block space. According to data from Dune Analytics, approximately 75% of non-vote transactions failed on April 4, largely due to a surge in activity driven by the memecoin craze. Cronje believes that this data is often misunderstood and refers to Solana as a victim of its own success.

Solana users took to social media to express their frustration with the transaction failures and degraded user experience. Some members of the community supported Cronje’s perspective, highlighting the challenges that come with increased demand and temporary user experience issues. Solana’s CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko, expressed his own frustration, noting that addressing congestion bugs is more difficult than dealing with total liveness failure. Congestion bugs require a lengthy testing process and the release of updates, which slows down the deployment of solutions.

This is not the first time that Solana has encountered issues. In early February 2024, the network suffered a significant outage that lasted over five hours, halting block progression on its mainnet. Since January 2022, Solana has experienced multiple outages, both partial and complete. Anza, a software development firm focused on Solana, released a postmortem report on a recent outage, revealing a bug in Solana’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache. To address this issue, the Solana Foundation plans to replace the old loader system with a new one that will deactivate upon the update rollout.

Despite these challenges, Solana’s price has seen a slight decline of around 3% in the past week, following a 45% rally in the previous month. As a result, it has dropped to the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with a value of $89 billion according to CoinGecko data.