Solana: One Hack Too Many

SummarySolana has suffered numerous security breaches in the last few months.Developers are looking for a long-term solution to the problem.Unless Solana does something quickly, it will be surpassed by better L1 blockchains.OverviewSolana (SOL-USD), the fast-growing blockchain often referred to as the "Ethereum-killer," uses a unique proof-of-stake consensus and proof-of-history with timestamps. This hybrid of proof-of-stake and proof-of-history makes Solana a fast blockchain; the timestamps allow very fast sequencing of validators. Solana's block time is 400 milliseconds, handling up to 50,000 transactions per second. Network fees on Solana are also very cheap. Low gas fees and high network throughput make many dApp developers prefer to build their dApp on Solana.Following the popularity of NFTs, Solana has seen a slew of NFTs minted on its blockchain. Popular NFT marketplaces, including SolSea and Magic Eden, are built on Solana.A Fast Network Plagued With OutagesSolana has suffered a handful of major network outages since its launch in 2020; three of the major outages occurred this year. The outages are the result of either a misconfigured node, bugs in Solana's code, or the network getting overwhelmed by artificial traffic from bots.In one recent network outage between September 30 and October 1, Solana's blockchain went off for about 6 hours. Stakewiz.com, a Solana validator operator, tweeted that a misconfigured node cau...