Is Solana Ready to Clean Up Its Issues and Soar?

Solana (SOL -1.63%) has done extremely well as far as user adoption goes, yet operational issues keep coming up. In this Motley Fool Live segment from "The Crypto Show," recorded on June 1, Fool.com contributors Travis Hoium, Chris MacDonald, and Jon Quast take a look at the state of Solana's business today. 

Travis Hoium: Chris, are you aware? Because I know, I follow some of the developers on Twitter, and they talked about a few upgrades that are either recently went into effect or are going to go into effect pretty soon. On Magic Eden you can just track the transaction per second that's going on, and they have a little warning if it goes under 2,000, I think it is. That little warning has been there for a long time. It's bounced between 1,500 and 2,000 most of the time when I go and check that. We have not seen a step increase as I think people had hoped, maybe a month or two ago, when some of these upgrades were going into effect. But is there anything going on behind the scenes from a development side that is an indicator that we're going to see higher transaction speeds or transactions per second? Or are we just in this long, merge like, hey, things will get better eventually. But we don't know when eventually is phase with Solana.

Chris Hill: In response to the last outage, you're right. The Solana developer team did come out with some updates to the protocol. One of the things that they were going to do is add in a fee that users can voluntarily pay to get to the front of line. Similar to how Ethereum works with, you pay X Ether to move your transaction up. They're going to do that because proof of history doesn't allow for that. That's one of the reasons why it's cheap, but also, you lose that stability. I think it was, almost like, a DDoS attack where it got overloaded with bots that were spamming it for various NFT purchases and crushed the system. I actually have the Solana Explorer up. It was at around 1,000 transactions per second this morning. I'm just looking at it now. The TPS has just dropped down to 25, and so that's incredibly slow. I don't know if I can share my screen here.

Travis Hoium: Magic Eden is saying the network is restarting at the moment.

Jon Quast: Go ahead, Chris.

Chris MacDonald: Yeah.

Travis Hoium: [laughs] Interesting. There you go, Solana is apparently down. [laughs].

Chris MacDonald: Yeah, there you go.

Jon Quast: On the air revelation. It's almost seems like it's been a victim of its own success over the past year. It's done so well as far as the user adoption goes, and yet, these operational issues just keep coming up.

Travis Hoium: It will be really interesting to see because I think the reason that I'm bullish on Solana and we've talked about this in the past, I think Chris says, and Jon have similar thoughts is, if we're going to go mass adoption with cryptocurrency and NFTs and all these blockchain technology that we talk about every week, we can't have $50 transactions and we can't have them take 10 minutes or 30 minutes on a layer 2. It's got to be fast and it's got to be cheap. Solana is arguably the best at this point, but it has had some major growing pains and it looks like today is going to be another example of that. It'll be really interesting to see how they handle it. One thing I do think that's interesting is the one of the criticisms Solana always gets is it's not as decentralized as something like Ethereum. There is a CEO of the Solana, I don't know.

Chris MacDonald: Solana Labs, I think.

Travis Hoium: Solana Labs, who can make decisions about what things are going to develop. I would argue that when you have things like this going on, somebody has to take the reins and say, "here's what we're going to do." So I don't necessarily fall into the, Hey, everything decentralized is better camp. But we will see, you have Solana, you have Ethereum and going through similar growing pains and upgrades right now so we'll see who gets to a better spot in the next few months.