Solana, currently the fifth largest cryptocurrency in the world is experiencing a continued increase in programming and development activity despite the recent Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on it. The attack did cause some issues on the network including its slowing down but that didn’t stop it from continuing its impressive growth over time.
Just a few months ago, Solana was below the top 15 in the charts and its usage was quite limited. Now every other crypto project including Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are being developed and deployed on the SOL network. According to Sentiment data, daily GitHub submissions that signify the amount of development efforts of a particular blockchain network surpassed both Cardano and Polkadot to become the highest in the world. Daily submissions reached as high as 90 while those of Cardano remained stuck at 65 and that of Polkadot were around 76. While Bitcoin is a much larger network overall, it is not designed for much direct development and therefore, it doesn’t get used as much for both layer 1 and layer 2 solutions.
Solana is truly leading the way at the moment when it comes to GitHub contributions and smart contracts, but it still has a long way to go before it can challenge the father of the sector: Ethereum.
The network recently came under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that left the network slow and unresponsive for a while. This means that the digital currency’s transactions and programmable ability both took a hit because of this deliberated cyber attack. However, for the Solana bulls, it was welcoming because despite being much smaller in size than Ethereum, it managed to ward off the attackers. A DDOS attack is a bot-initiated attempt to tried to overwhelm a blockchain network through fake traffic.
Solana used a Proof-of-History (PoH) consensus mechanism and therefore it is very different from other networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin. It is therefore sometimes seen as more vulnerable than the more popular Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) systems.
According to a Grayscale investment report:
“The Solana consensus mechanism uses a new blockchain technology that is not widely used, and may not function as intended. There may be flaws in the cryptography underlying the network, including flaws that affect the functionality of the Solana Network or make the network vulnerable to attack.”
However, Solana has managed to ward off the fake traffic attack and managed to come out relatively unharmed. However, stronger attacks are likely to occur in the near future and it is going to be tested harder. Back in September, the SOL network also faced a similar attack that led to a network outage of as high as 17 hours, which is unacceptable for a blockchain network looking to become the industry standard.
Image by Markus Spiske from Pixabay
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