Mythbusting Solana – downtime, competition and technology with Matt Sorg of Solana Foundation – SlateCast #38

Matt Sorg, product and technology lead for the Solana Foundation, spoke to Akiba of CryptoSlate about Solana and its future in the crypto space.

Akiva started by asking why Sorg was attracted to Solana. In response, Sorg said he believes Solana is very different from other protocols in terms of technology, scalability and future potential. He said:

“Solana is a differentiated technology and there is a lot of noise about how things will scale in the future, but Solana is ready now and ready for the future in a very user-friendly way. It has a very clear path to scaling very arbitrarily.”

He also explained why Solana is one of the top protocols preferred by Web3 gamers. “Gamers need very high performance for their apps,” he said, adding that Solana stands out by offering the best time in transaction confirmation.

Breakdown of Solana

When Akiba asked why Solana was so out of order, Sougu explained why, citing two reasons.

First of all, according to Sorg, Solana doesn’t primarily have marketing concerns in mind. he said:

“We’re not marketers. We call certain things outages, but other chains call them congestion.”

He further explained that Solana facilitates hundreds of transactions per second during downtime. Sorg said this is far more than what many chains promote at their best. Still, such a situation would be identified as congestion by other chains’ standards, “but by Solana’s standards,” Sorg said, “it’s an outage.”

Second, Sorg said the outage was due to its distributed infrastructure. Sometimes, “different systems can’t agree on what the next block should be,” says Sorg.

The Future of Blockchain and Solana

When discussing possible multi-chain futures, Sorg spoke about the importance of integration and shared security. He said:

“We will have different technologies that optimize in different ways. I think there will be integrations that different chains and different protocols will have to learn from other protocols.”

That said, Sorg also acknowledges that the bridge’s security weaknesses need to be addressed. He defined the problem as a “hard problem”. It’s all about having different networks and he relies on one chain to tie them together, which can be solved by proper “chain-level consensus and agreement”.

Regarding Solana’s positioning in this multi-chain future, Sorg said, “It will become more configurable over time.” He further added:

“From the outside, it’s hard to appreciate how much innovation is happening under the hood of solana. Today the solana protocol is much more stable than it was in January of this year. As time goes on, we’ll see any sling over 12-18 months, and more configuration options will emerge.”

Crash between Solana and FTX

Solana Token (SOL) is one of the major tokens affected by the FTX crash. A few days after the exchange started having trouble, SOL dropped 67.7%, dropping from $38.49 to $12.40. It is trading at $13.70 at the time of writing.

This downfall was due to Solana’s relationship with FTX. There are several Solana-based projects on the venture capital side of FTX, and investors have come to recognize the protocol as part of FTX.

However, the Solana Foundation has addressed concerns about community congestion by stating that exposure to FTX is minimal. In a blog post published on November 14th, the foundation revealed that it held certain assets worth about $190 million before the exchange collapsed, but that value has shrunk since the crash. fell below his $35 million.