For blockchain games, choosing a blockchain is one of the most significant decisions they will have to make. There are a few frontrunners in the conversation of the best network for gaming and Solana is certainly up there. Solana is an excellent ecosystem with depth and promise, however, it is being marred by technical issues.
Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 9:00 PM UTC, following a roughly 4 and a half hour outage after the network failed to reach consensus. Network operators an dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) June 1, 2022
In 2022, Solana has experienced five outages — a rate of nearly one per month. An outage for a blockchain is comfortably one of the most damaging things it can suffer and Solana’s recent blip lasted four and a half hours. The issue was a bug that caused a consensus failure, explained below by a Solana developer:
Today, the Solana blockchain stopped. This commit leads to speculation that the durable nonces feature contains a DoS vulnerability (chain split) that has caused nodes to disagree, breaking consensus. https://t.co/oVivwcvQWW
— Richard Patel (@terorie_dev) June 1, 2022
Chain splits occur when two parts of the network compute a different state given the same transactions, for any reason. They are a class of bug that are hard to prevent entirely even with large test coverage, and affect any chain.
— Richard Patel (@terorie_dev) June 1, 2022
However, the worrying part comes later in this thread when Patel explains that the restart is an emergency fix and does not solve the cause of the problem. Issues with Solana’s code as well as network congestion have plagued the network achieving otherwise impressive adoption and recognition. Nevertheless, the latest outage caused a sizeable dip in the price of $SOL, which is already enduring the crypto bear market.
Why Is This Worrying for Blockchain Games?
Firstly, Solana has a lot of skin in the game when it comes to blockchain gaming. Huge, flagship projects such as Star Atlas and Aurory are on the Solana network. Then the Move-to-Earn trend is housed almost exclusively on Solana with Genopets and STEPN.
What is more worrying to me is one of my favorite blockchain gaming projects is currently exclusively on Solana: Fractal, a blockchain gaming platform by Twitch co-founder, Justin Kan. Then there is SkateX and the PUBG developers’ partnership with Solana too.
So, why is this worrying for blockchain games? Well, blockchain gaming is transaction-intensive. This means that network congestion is a high risk and that the theoretical transaction ceilings that every chain quotes could be tested. With the staggering investment going into blockchain gaming and metaverse projects, many of which are on Solana, the added risk of network failure may be too much.
I will reiterate that Solana is a superb ecosystem and hopefully an important player in the future of blockchain gaming, but such frequent outages before a game on the network goes viral, is a worrying sign.
