Solana has faced outages, close ties to FTX and criticism over centralization. The biggest challenges the network has met.
In 2021 and 2022 the Solana network stopped several times, sometimes for many hours. The cause was often large volumes of automated transactions that overloaded the system.
For a network meant to carry payments and trading, this was a serious problem. Solana has since made a series of changes, and outages have become far rarer.
The crypto exchange FTX and the trading firm Alameda Research were among Solana's biggest backers and held a lot of SOL. When FTX collapsed in 2022, the price of SOL fell sharply, and many thought the network would not survive.
Solana recovered anyway, driven by a developer community that kept building. The episode showed how vulnerable a network can be to single players.
Critics argue that Solana is more centralized than Bitcoin and Ethereum. Validators need expensive hardware, and much of the development has been led by Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation.
Solana has responded with more independent software and measures to spread validators geographically and across more operators.
For a long time, almost all validators ran the same software. A bug in it could therefore stop the entire network.
Firedancer, new validator software developed by the trading firm Jump Crypto, is meant to provide an alternative and reduce this risk.