Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko has defined the distinctive strategy Solana takes to make sure safety and efficiency in its blockchain. In response to a tweet suggesting that Solana’s outages had been as a consequence of on-chain votes, Yakovenko clarified that proof of stake techniques require quite a lot of community communication for validation, and Solana makes use of quadratic messaging overhead as a requirement for traditional Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus.
Solana has numerous nodes, with 3,000 in its quorum, which means that it must deal with numerous messages for every spherical.
To handle this load, Solana has carried out subcommittees that maintain the quorum at 200 nodes, however this strategy requires consensus to be measured in seconds and entails safety and efficiency tradeoffs.
Solana goals to be quick and safe, and its 2,800-node quorum is designed to detect any nefarious exercise by a small minority of nodes within the lengthy tail of validations, making certain that the smallest staked validator supplies the identical degree of safety as the most important staked one.
Yakovenko additionally defined why votes are carried out as transactions. Since each different consumer state transition, resembling an open e-book order, requires the identical degree of safety, every message have to be propagated to all 3,000 nodes within the quorum. Solana makes use of one optimized pipeline for all messages, together with votes, so they’re carried out as transactions as a result of it is essentially the most environment friendly methodology.
Solana’s design is exclusive and extremely optimized for safety and efficiency, as Yakovenko emphasised. Nonetheless, sustaining such a community requires balancing tradeoffs between safety, efficiency, and complexity. Yakovenko’s rationalization highlights the challenges concerned in making certain Solana’s continued success.
