Engineers have restored Solana’s Blockchain to 100% operational status in response to a network error. “The issue was a node was misconfigured or running Solana,” Stakewiz said, a Solana operator. This isn’t the first time Solana has had outages, network issues, etc. Last year there were multiple incidents, and in September 2021, Solana was offline for 18 hours. On Friday night, the Solana Status Twitter account acknowledged the latest issue.
On Saturday morning, they announced that validator operators had completed a restart of the Solana mainnet. The duplicate work was recognized, and it is unclear if the offending validator was running a separate instance. Both instances resulted in a block.
The code caused an invalid result, where validators became “stuck” on the wrong fork and unable to access the winning one. In her blog post “Web3 is going just great”, Molly White argues that the Ethereum network may still be centralized. A single node, she points out, can bring it offline.
Solana Has Had a History of Outages
A platform called Solana is cheaper and faster to use than Ethereum. It processes 50,000 transactions per second, while Ethereum can only process 13 transactions per second. Transaction fees are also notably lower on Solana.
Investors began focusing on alternative Blockchains such as Solana during last year’s crypto run-up. Solana closed a $314 million private token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital in June of this year.
However, the last year has shown this trade-off. It is common for the Blockchain network to experience outages and transaction halts. In May, Solana became inaccessible due to a network restart that also caused it to become inaccessible.
Recently, it faced its 4th major outage, which stopped processing transactions for over 6 hours. It is the 9th incident if we consider all the partial as well as major outages in the Solana network’s history. The SOL price is also affected by these outages, but it still ranks among the top 10 cryptocurrencies.
Advantages of Solana
Solana allows transactions per second to be up to 710,000 in a 1-gigabit network. It can reach maximum throughput and high availability for its network. Smart contracts are made possible by the bytecode and efficient design of the Berkeley Packet Filter. The transaction flow is consensus-agnostic, and hardware becomes the limitation.
- Solana can process 50,000 transactions per second with exceptionally low fees.
- It uses breakthrough innovations to maintain scalability.
- Solana’s extensive user base lets them offer low-cost funding options and still make a profit.
- Decentralized storage systems ensure easy compositability on Solana, making it simple for users to create new projects.
Top Alternative Blockchains to Solana
Near
Near Protocol is a smart-contract capable Layer-1 Blockchain offering high throughput and faster speeds. This protocol offers low transaction costs and a high level of compatibility between different chains.
The consensus algorithm used by NEAR is known as “Nightshade.” Sharding ensures blocks reach finality in under 2 seconds by dividing all transactions on the Blockchain into units called “shards.”
NEAR Protocol has a maximum supply of 1 billion tokens, of which over $3 billion are currently in circulation. Its proximity to major Blockchain projects and sharding protocol gives it a major advantage for investors.
The NEAR Protocol employs human-readable addresses, such as “your name.near,” rather than lengthy account numbers (such as a wallet address that is 42 characters long). Additionally, the NEAR Protocol offers a “Rainbow Bridge” Ethereum bridge that enables easy token transfers between the two Blockchain networks.
Moreover, users of Web3 no longer have to wait for an accessible link between fiat and crypto. The NEAR ecosystem’s first debit card and payments widget, NearPay, now offers a smooth user experience that connects the fiat and cryptocurrency worlds. NearPay can be used as a mobile app as well as a debit card in physical form. Buyers, developers, and businesses can use NearPay’s different functions to conduct immediate transactions and payments utilizing their favorite cryptocurrency, as well as NEAR.
Cardano
ADA is the native currency for Cardano, and it’s one of the oldest and largest cryptocurrencies in the market. Founded by Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum, Cardano has a long history and is a robust Blockchain network with real-world use cases. The downside to Cardano is its lack of smart contract integration. The Cardano foundation announced that they are working on it as we speak.
Users can make the best use of the SimpleSwap wallet to buy Cardano at their convenience and budget. SimpleSwap is a cryptocurrency exchange service. They do not hold your money or require account creation since they do not store your funds. SimpleSwap has a wide range of coins available to users, and with an easy process, users can exchange as much and as often as they want.
BNB Chain
In 2017, Binance and its token of the same name were created. Three years later, Binance released its decentralized smart chain (BSC) as a foundation for the Decentralized Finance revolution. Today, Binance and BSC are closely linked as they have both benefited from the success of each other.
MetaFi is also a key part of innovating for the future. The world has changed and has 1 billion users, and it is MetaFi’s goal to make it easier for them. BNB Chain’s mission is to build infrastructure powering the world’s parallel virtual ecosystem, and it promises that this infrastructure will be finely tuned to work smoothly with our community.
People can make transactions in BNB Chain by using the ChangeHero wallet. The most trustworthy fast bitcoin exchange is ChangeHero. A group of cryptocurrency aficionados with years of Fintech experience, all of which are supported by a powerful API. Popular crypto wallets like Trezor, CoolWallet S, and Exodus have already integrated the ChangeHero exchange so that you can effortlessly trade cryptocurrencies right within the wallet.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Each Alternative Blockchain Compared to Solana
Solana Vs Near
NEAR tokens ensure that transactions are verified via a consensus protocol. The SOL token grants holders rights to vote on proposals, while the NEAR token is used in data storage. Therefore, being used to pay for data storage, the NEAR token also has another purpose that Solana does not. As an added incentive to create dapps on the NEAR Blockchain, creators of smart contracts on the platform also get a share of 30% of all transaction fees across the entire network.
NEAR Protocol has solid Blockchain solutions, but the following are key differences. The Solana mainnet went live in March 2020, while NEAR Protocol’s mainnet went live in April 2020. However, the Solana Blockchain has made headlines by becoming the fastest Blockchain, with a throughput of around 65,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Solana has a total worth of $2.88 billion, whereas NEAR has $322 million. The average transaction fee for Solana is much higher than NEAR’s average transaction fee because the calculations for Solana are not as simple as for NEAR.
With NEAR and SOL, investors can buy each token at a low price and sell them at a higher price. To be able to stake or vote with these new coins, users will need to download their wallets.
Also, NEAR, community-driven Blockchain technology is dedicated to improving the cryptocurrency industry by prioritizing usability and transforming the world with Web3. NEAR provides an easy-to-use environment for creating and delivering dApps. Additionally, it has a number of modular parts that let developers efficiently create smart projects like token contracts and NFTs.
Solana Vs Cardano
Pros
- Both the Cardano and Solana networks facilitate smart contract and DApp use, which makes them perfect for ambitious developers.
- Cardano and Solana have surpassed Ethereum because they were created to do so; they had a specific aim of doing this.
- Scalability, low fees, and speed all make these cryptocurrencies outstanding options. Cardano can handle 250 tps, while Solana’s 2,700 tps is industry-leading.
Cons
- Cardano has more expensive fees than Ethereum, with an average fee of €0.18 per transaction. However, Solana offers incredibly low fees across €0.00025 per transaction, at 800 times cheaper than Cardano.
- Cardano generates solutions to complex problems in developing new technology before integrating it into their network. Similarly, Solana has a proactive and innovative approach, but its execution process is different from Cardano’s.
Solana Vs BNB Chain
CoinMarketCap ranks BNB 4th with a $53.4 billion market cap and a $1.4 billion daily trading volume.
BNB traded at $37.92 at the beginning of 2021 but is now above $350, which tells us that BNB has had an ROI of 818% this year.
The Solana token has a market cap of $10.2 billion, and they have a 24-hour trading volume of $372 million. The SOL coin has experienced a greater price appreciation than BNB this year. Growing its value from $1.54 to $37.16 for the year, it grew by a YTD ROI of 2,313% as of June 18th.
With a 38.91% network utilization rate, Binance can handle at least 160 transactions per second. The daily number of transactions on the Binance network averages 62.4 per second as of June 17.
Solana had an average block time of 0.610 seconds in the last hour and processed around 700 TPS, which is more than four times what BSC can handle.
Recently, the average fee on a Binance Smart Chain transaction was 7.6 gwei, while the average gas used per transaction was 123,000. With this in consideration, the average transfer cost is $0.325
If an exchange is conducted on Solana, it would be $0.000186 worth of SOL Token. This is due to the platform being in beta release and lacking sophisticated network stats and charts.
Conclusion
Before investing in Cardano, BNB Chain, or Solana, get your research done and consider portfolio diversification and your risk tolerance. Just because the market is turbulent doesn’t mean an investment decision should be made by someone acting impulsively.
The alternatives mentioned above are the best alternatives to Solana that you can look for. NEAR is one reputed alternative to Solana that you can opt for. So, are you ready to invest? Look for the details mentioned above and make the right choice by studying more about the market.
