Unchained - Unconfirmed: Solana's Outage Lasted 17 Hours. What Does This Mean for Decentralization? - Ep.273

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Starting point is 00:00:33 Second, as I mentioned earlier, I'm now writing a Facebook Bulletin newsletter, joining the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, Malala Yousafi, and Adam Grant, among others. This week's addition includes a sidebar to the interview here in Unconfirmed, and it's a conversation with a Solana validator about his experience of the outage and what he thinks Salana could do better going forward. If you're not already signed up, subscribe at laura shin.b bulletin.com. You'll also find all the links to the weekly news recap there, which I send out every week as part of the Facebook Bulletin subscription.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Again, you can sign up at laura shinn.b bulletin.com. And now on to the show. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unconfirmed. The show that reveals how the marquee names and crypto are reacting to the week's top headlines and gets the insight skip on what they see on the horizon. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto six years ago and as the senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time.

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Starting point is 00:02:22 Get $25 when you download the crypto.com app with code Laura. The link is in the description. Today's guest is Aidan Mott, research analyst at Masari. Welcome, Aidan. Hi, Laura. Thank you for having me all. So this was quite the remarkable week for Solana, which is that fast-rising blockchain that many view as a competitor to Ethereum. Tell us what happened. Yeah. So on September 14th, Tuesday of this week, around 7.50 in the morning, Eastern standard time, validators started noticing that their current node, current validator, blocks were misaligned and they saw a large inflow of transactions later to realize to be stemming from the Great Protocol IDO that was hosted on Radium, the IDO initial decks offering, similar to ICOs in the past on Radium. These tokens were allotted to be sold at a specific

Starting point is 00:03:30 price at a specific time. People interested in participating in this auction knew what the token standard was. They had the address and they were able to see ahead of time what parameters they would need to send a transaction to purchase these tokens. And people use that opportunity to set up automated transactions from bots, which led to hundreds of thousands of transactions, all hitting these validators at the same time. These validators, saw this influx as it was happening. This led to forking across the validators. There was instability across the chain.

Starting point is 00:04:10 There was the last set block that all validators could agree on was falling behind where other validators were. The issue of this stems in the fact that Solana processes in parallel transactions, as well as messages related to critical consensus, transactions, and critical consensus messages within the same block. So as this queue of transactions built up messages about consensus were being put further down in the queue when they weren't able to be propagated across validators. And as this queue builds further and further up, you saw what they call a deadlock

Starting point is 00:04:49 with these parallel information flows being clogged. And the network got to the point where block production halted completely. And so what became called the outage actually lasted for 17 hours. And I was curious, can you put that length of time for the next block to be created into context in terms of what has happened on other chains that maybe have been around a bit longer than Solana? Yeah. One example actually that Solana Labs, CEO and a talk. totally mentioned on Twitter is that Bitcoin recently, when the hash rate fell off significantly,

Starting point is 00:05:35 primarily in the West China, specifically miners, went offline. You saw this rapid change to the difficulty on the network due to the hash rate decrease, which led to about two hours, I believe, 120 minutes between block times. It's not an exact equivalency. Bitcoin in all senses was still operating as we're supposed to. That's a natural reaction to what we call it difficulty adjustment. Salana itself had actually experienced an outage of around six hours on December 4th, 2020, and actually even sooner on September 2nd of 2021, the network experienced general instability due to a very similar situation that happened with the Star Atlas and Polis IDO on Radium. So the length of the outage was the longest scene on Solana.

Starting point is 00:06:33 Generally, anytime you have a blockchain down for that amount of time where there's actual economic activity like these decentralized applications, the potential impact becomes bigger, the longer the outages occurs as you have this kind of disconnect between this chain in the ecosystem of other chains and applications you have linked through there. So 18 hours is definitely a significant amount of time for a network to be offline, but it's not outside of the realm of kind of not a normal course of action for Salana, but it's not something that was completely unexpected or out of surprise people's minds and what they consider acceptable within the Salana network. Oh, it is not considered out of bounds for what they consider acceptable. well. In the sense of, if you're looking at it as a sense of the actual technical consensus

Starting point is 00:07:31 mechanism, it would be. I would say that Solana's tried to, and Solana team members try to position this as something that should not necessarily be expected, but they view it as something as part of calling it the Solana main net beta. It's not that the technical part failed, the social consensus in a sense of what people are willing to accept as this still being the Salana network, I would say didn't necessarily violate those standards. Okay, yeah. I mean, the one thing I would say about Anatoly's comparison to when the Bitcoin hash rate dropped is that since the Bitcoin block is only mined on average every 10 minutes,

Starting point is 00:08:16 you know, by that measure, I guess you could say it was maybe just like a dozen blocks behind of where it would have been, whereas obviously here, you know, because one is a much faster blockchain that, you know, when you, if you're using 17 hours as, you know, what the outage was, then it's many, many, many more blocks that were missed. So anyway, what was the community reaction to what happened here? I separated into the community of community within kind of not necessarily all engineers or validators themselves, but people who are actively participating on the Salana network, whether that be application developers, whether that be validators, or kind of these tangential infrastructure providers, I think it was definitely very concerning

Starting point is 00:09:05 in the sense of is this kind of a root, is the root cause something that will be able to be patched as the application stands today, or is there fundamental issues with how the consensus mechanism in specific how transactions and consensus is propagated across the network. I think that validators quickly realized that a restart would be a solution that would get the network running again. And as I mentioned before, they've done this in December. So it is something that they're, in a sense, prepared for. They restarts as part of the process of the Salana TestNet TDS or Tour de Salana, I believe.

Starting point is 00:09:49 is what the test net has been called. So this is something that once identified, they knew what the solution was, at least in the short term. In the longer term, I think there's going to be a lot of discussion and a lot of research and ideating on if this is a problem that can be solved

Starting point is 00:10:07 with these iterative patches or releases from the Salama Labs. Okay, but in the moment, in order to get it back up and running, what did they do at that time? So for the Salana network to restart, there's a threshold of active stake on the network that needs to be running the updated code to restart the network. Compared to December, the number of validators has increased almost twofold. I believe it was around 400 active validators in December. This most recent one on September 14th, it was closer to 600 validators.

Starting point is 00:10:44 So while it's not the number of validators, but the stake, or the amount of tokens they're holding as validators, that is important for reaching that threshold. Validators were had to coordinate across time zones, primarily in the Solana mainnet data validators Discord channel, to one, alert everyone that this problem's happening. They needed to wait probably, I believe it was two to three hours before the official restart instructions were shared

Starting point is 00:11:15 from the Solana Labs team. But in that meantime, there really wasn't a whole lot for validators to do at that time because they didn't have the updated code ready to go to restart their validators. Once validators did have that code that was shared by the Salon Labs team, they were then able to start restarting their nodes, getting their nodes back online. And as that happened, you saw over the next 10 to 12 hours, you saw state continuously increase as more validators were participants. participating in this restart and when it did hit that 80% threshold, that's when the network was able to restart again from the snapshot taken of the network before the outage to decide what the last finalized block was to restart the network from there. All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk about what this means for Solana and for the space in general. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Do you love sports collectibles or fantasy sports?

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Starting point is 00:13:21 description. Back to my conversation with Aden Mott. So during this time, what was the communication from the Salana Foundation and or CEO Anatoly Icovenko, who you mentioned earlier, in terms of their explanation for this outage? Yeah. So the first official communication, communication from the Salana team came at about 830 on Tuesday, September 14, which noted that there was instability of the main net cluster. This was the first indication from the Salana team that there was, in fact, instability issues on the network. And shortly after, around 45 minutes, the Salana official communications team for Twitter announced that validators were proposing to restart the network. but it would not actually restart for around another 16 hours after that. Anatoly was quite active in communications at this time on Twitter. I would say in general, Anatoly is pretty well, he expresses Salinas, how he sees Salana in the crypto ecosystem very well.

Starting point is 00:14:37 He is a sense of kind of altruism around how he sees his network, not his network, but the Salana network relative to these other smart contract platforms. And I think we saw a little bit of, I would consider kind of reactive information. He had a reactive reaction, I guess you could say, to what he saw as people maybe pointing out, attempting to demeat, not I can't think of the word at the moment. I think he became pretty defensive. And I think that's understandable in kind of this situation where you have all of these different validators that you're trying to coordinate. It's a multi-billion dollar network and you're trying to fix the problem as fast as possible.

Starting point is 00:15:24 But there's constraints that don't make that possible, such as the coordination across time zones, hundreds of different validators all trying to communicate through Discord and other messaging platforms like that. I would say relative to other incidents, performance-related incidents to Solana, this is definitely the one that's captured the attention in the mindshare of the industry for the media, for the community members. So I think looking back, it's going to be important how going forward the Salana team addresses this issue from a communication standpoint, from a technical standpoint. this reaction will kind of define what the short-term future of Salada looks like and how Solana is viewed relative to other networks and other smart contract platforms in the industry.

Starting point is 00:16:20 Yeah, I think, you know, I noticed kind of as time went on and, well, frankly, after they got the network up and running again, he was tweeting things like, sometimes a block takes 17 hours or there was a Twitter user who kind of made fun of some, I guess, older Solana marketing that called Solana Unstoppable. And his response to that was the humans is what makes it unstoppable. So, you know, I think he's already kind of trying to, you know, put his spin on what happened there. But, you know, at this moment, so after that patch that they made and then the new restart, which is essentially a hard fork, at this moment is. Is Selen is still vulnerable to that kind of attack?

Starting point is 00:17:04 Yeah. So I would say at this current point, the patch, the simplest explanation I give for what I can give for what the patch did was, it prioritizes consensus messages within this parallel threading on these blocks. So this avoids the issue where consensus messages aren't prioritized to be sent and propagated in the face of these excess transactions, the DDoS of the network. And this particular issue was something

Starting point is 00:17:36 that had actually been patched partially following the Star Atlas and Polis IDO. And I think an equivalency I'd heard was it was four of like the six major problems identified from that incident had been patched by the time that the great protocol IDO happened, which triggered the outage. So there was outstanding,

Starting point is 00:17:57 known bugs that were then patched following the restart. It's difficult to say exactly if Solana is vulnerable to this specific attack again where you have, I'd say it's almost a misnomer to call it an attack. These actors weren't trying to take the Salana network offline. They were trying to participate in this initial Dex offering. So if in fact in the future there was malicious entities attempting to do this, it's hard to say if there's not a similar attack. Yeah, yeah. Actually, right when I said the word attack, you know, I meant it was more like an attack of enthusiasm or something like that rather than something malicious. However, you know, it is worth, I think, pointing out that I guess because transactions on Solana are, you know, quite inexpensive that that, you know,

Starting point is 00:18:53 is another factor here in that is what makes this sort of thing possible. So, you know, I did see a lot of conversation on Twitter about what was going down. And Neha, Nerula of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative asked on Twitter, serious question, if your validator community can easily coordinate for a network restart, what's to prevent them from coordinating to block transactions or contracts when compelled to by the SEC? see. And I wondered what you thought the Salana community's response would be to that question. Yeah. So I think the Salana response, the Salana community response to that would be that there wasn't an immediate available solution to restart the network. The fact that they did have to

Starting point is 00:19:38 communicate to all validators over this span of 18 hours to this communication flow as well as having to create this code to send it out to have validators do it themselves. It's something that I think they would point to to say that this isn't centralized. If it was centralized, there would be a single entity that would be able to restart it arbitrarily or be able to influence validator or coerce validators into running this code without validator participation. I'm not sure if that's a necessarily very strong argument. But I'd also say that the Salana community is perfectly, not perfectly except, perfectly fine with, but they understand that there is a level of centralization

Starting point is 00:20:26 within the Salana network. And that's one of the tradeoffs that they're willing to accept compared to other networks. Some networks like Bitcoin, that's something that wouldn't be accepted on a consensus or a social level. Block times aren't nearly as important or transactions for a second are for other networks. Salana has really built itself as this platform for fast transactions. A big market they're trying to appeal to is high-frequency traders. That's something I hear a lot when

Starting point is 00:20:57 talking about what's the target audience for Solana. And I think there is a level of acceptance in acknowledgement of that trade-off. So I would say it's difficult to assess the centralization based solely on the validator restart, but it is definitely a strong point of centralization compared to other networks. There isn't any kind of diversity of which clients these validators are running compared to, say, the Ethereum network.

Starting point is 00:21:29 They're all running the same client released from Salana Labs. And any kind of control over that specific vector is definitely what I'd consider a very centralized aspect of the network. And do you think that they're going to address that? Because I did see comparisons on Twitter to the DOS attacks on Ethereum in the fall of 2016. And really the saving grace at that time was the fact that there were multiple clients. So do you know if the community does plan to go that route? Specifically, I do not know of any plans myself. It would make sense. It's almost like the natural logical progression of a network.

Starting point is 00:22:09 once you kind of stop being reliant on this single code base, and you have this diversity, and you have the ability for validators to choose what they're running. You have this kind of voluntary validators who choose to opt in or opt out of which code base they're running. So it makes sense. I haven't heard any specific plans at this time. Okay. And just last question and going back to this question about centralization,

Starting point is 00:22:37 You know, when you talked about how the Sala community does seem comfortable with the level of centralization that their network does have at this point in time, you know, obviously all of this is happening at the same time that we have these conversations, you know, in Congress and with the chair of the SEC talking about how they would regulate defy and Chairman Gensler basically kind of implying that things in defy aren't necessarily as decentralized as you. would think. And so I just wonder, has that come up at all where they kind of recognize that there are people watching and who the typical way to enforce is through centralized entities? So I don't know if you've seen any commentary on that. I haven't seen a talk of commentary on that specifically. My guess would be that wasn't necessarily the forethought at the forethought of what a lot of people were focusing on at the time in this kind of crisis situation. But I think it is something that is especially important moving forward, giving the regulatory climate, as you've mentioned. And I think it's important for the developers on these networks to be very explicit in acknowledging these

Starting point is 00:23:51 points of centralization. One, its information flows are always good. It allows their users to understand what tradeoffs they're accepting, but it also allows them to identify issues or specific points of centralization that independent developers can work to build on. So I don't think them not addressing it would fix that problem if it is something that would come under a regulatory purview. And I understand that they might not be willing to advertise specific points of centralization

Starting point is 00:24:22 as they in this climate might be seen as asking for the SEC to come investigate something specifically. But I think it's something that definitely needs to be addressed from the highest level, Salana Labs and Anatoly and anyone participating on the network who has a high level of influence to acknowledge what their influence is and where they see the direction of the network going and laying out a roadmap that the community could have input on on where you're going to get to this point where you can say it is not centralized in those specific manner. Okay, well, we will have to see where this all goes. All right, well, thank you so much for coming

Starting point is 00:25:05 on Unconfirmed. This has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you. I enjoy speaking with you as well. Don't forget, next step is the weekly news recap. Stick around for this week in crypto after this short break. Does your firm need rigorously vetted crypto market data that's aligned with the latest regulatory standards? Since 2017, Digital Asset Research has delivered high-quality crypto data to institutional clients like Futsi Russell and Bloomberg. Digital Asset Research offers clean crypto asset prices and verifiable volume data that's calculated from highly vetted sources, crypto asset reference data, and an events calendar that tracks token and blockchain events like hard forks, soft forks, and client and application updates. Crypto data from digital asset research is available through refinative or directly at digital asset research.com. Thanks for tuning into this week's news recap. First headline, SEC Chair Gary Gansler believes crypto exchanges need to register with the SEC.

Starting point is 00:26:10 In his speech before the Senate Banking Committee, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gansler, reiterated his belief that crypto exchanges need to register as securities exchanges. In his opening statement, he remarked, quote, many platforms have dozens or hundreds of tokens on them. While each token's legal status depends on its own facts and circumstances, the probability is quite remote that with 50, 100, or 1,000 tokens, any given platform has zero securities. In response to a question from Senator Elizabeth Warren regarding Coinbase, Gensler specifically singled out the exchange, lamenting the fact that it had not registered with the SEC, quote, even though they have dozens of tokens that might be securities. Gensler's comment comes shortly after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong took to Twitter to accuse the SEC and Gensler in particular

Starting point is 00:26:59 of what he called sketchy behavior regarding the regulation of different crypto products. notably, the SEC threatened to sue Coinbase if the exchange released its lend product, which offers users yield in return for users staking certain crypto assets with the company. In a conversation with the block, Gensler also spoke on lending products this week, saying, quote, if you're investing on a centralized exchange or a centralized lending platform, you no longer own your token. You've transferred ownership to the platform. All you have is a counterparty risk. And that platform might be saying, as many of them do, We'll give you a 4% or 7% return if you stake your coins with us, or you actually transfer

Starting point is 00:27:39 ownership and we the platform will stake your tokens. That takes on all the indicia of what Congress is trying to protect under the securities laws. Next headline. Digital assets may soon be subjected to the wash sale rule. The House Ways and Means Committee, which is in charge of any legislation dealing with taxation, approved draft legislation that would apply wash sale rules to digital assets. The draft comes as part of the Bill,

Starting point is 00:28:04 back better reconciliation package, they could see an increase of $3.5 trillion in taxes to offset the cost of future spending. According to the block, the current language is likely to remain intact, as House Democrats are determined to push the budget bill through to the Senate. At the moment, wash sale rules only apply to securities, not property, which is how the Internal Revenue Service classifies crypto. That means that currently, crypto can serve as a loophole for tax loss harvesting. traders can sell losses and almost immediately buy back at the same position while retaining the tax write-off. However, if this version of the bill were to pass, crypto holders would be held accountable to standard wash-sale rules, meaning that crypto owners would have to wait 30 days after selling a coin at a loss to purchase the coin back.

Starting point is 00:28:54 Additionally, tokens sold and purchased within 30 days would not be deductible as a capital loss. If adopted, crypto trades would be subject to watch. sale rules after December 31st, 2021. Next headline. OpenC Exec resigns after using insider info to purchase NFTs. OpenC's head of product, Nate Chastain, was caught buying NFTs based on insider information and has resigned, according to a statement issued by the company. Yesterday, we learned that one of our employees purchased items that they knew were set to display

Starting point is 00:29:27 on our front page before they appeared there publicly, said CEO Devin Finser, who also announced, the largest NFT marketplace is commissioning a third-party review. The revelations began Tuesday when Twitter user Zoooo TV accused Chastain of purchasing certain NFT projects just before they would show up on the front page, meaning he napped them before the price is spiked and could net easy profits. The next day, OpenCChee acknowledged the allegations were true, calling Chastain's actions, quote, incredibly disappointing. Although the technical definition of insider trading does not apply to crypto assets,

Starting point is 00:30:03 OpenC treated Chastain's actions as similar to front writing, and according to the block, legal experts say that such behavior could invite regulatory scrutiny. The NFT marketplace immediately instituted new guidelines for bidding employees from, one, buying or selling from collections or creators while OpenC was featuring or promoting them, and two, from using confidential information to buy or sell NFTs whether they are in OpenC or not. Next headline, Lightcoin and Walmart. the partnership that never was. A false press release published early Monday morning

Starting point is 00:30:37 announced that Walmart partnered with Likecoin to accept cryptocurrency as payment. The news was quickly picked up by various mainstream media outlets such as Reuters, Zero Hedge, Bloomberg, and CNBC, along with multiple crypto publications like CoinDesk, decrypt, the Lycoyne Twitter handle, and according to my editorial assistant,

Starting point is 00:31:00 the unchained Twitter handle, who he actually deleted the tweet in under 30 seconds and says, thank you very much. Lightcoin's price immediately jumped on the news, reaching $231 at its peak, good for a 30% increase in price, before dipping back down to $170 in about 90 minutes. In a statement, the Walmart Ceperstore later clarified its non-partnership.

Starting point is 00:31:22 Walmart was the subject of a fake news release issued on Monday, September 13th, that falsely stated Walmart announced a partnership with Lycoyne. Walmart had no knowledge of the press release issued by Globe Newswire, it is incorrect. Walmart has no relationship with like coin. Next headline. Coinbase futures trading could be coming soon. Coinbase announced its filing with the National Futures Association to register as a futures commission merchant, or FCM. The exchange explained the move on Twitter as part of its goal to grow the crypto economy.

Starting point is 00:31:53 Coinbase tweeted, this is the next step to broaden our offerings and offer futures and derivatives trading on our platforms. For exchanges like FTCS and Binance, both of which are increasing their presence in the U.S., derivatives' market volume is sizably larger than spot volume. An example of a derivative is the futures contract, which allows customers to buy and sell contracts speculating on the price of specific cryptocurrencies on a particular future date. To sell derivatives in the U.S., businesses must be approved by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission or CFDC, the regulator in charge of all derivatives products. However, typically, the first step in the process is gaining approval from the NFA, which then handles the registration process. Speaking of Coinbase, the exchange announced plans to sell $1.5 billion of debt offerings. The company will use the influx of cash for general purposes, such as product development and future acquisitions. Next headline.

Starting point is 00:32:49 Binance CEO believes centralization is key. According to Binance CEO, Chang Peng Zhao, the exchange is scrapping plans to discentral. centralized its business model. Zhao explained in an interview with the South China Morning Post, quote, four years ago when we started, we wanted to embrace the decentralized model, so we wanted to have decentralized teams everywhere. But we do run one centralized exchange, which is the biggest part of our business. Now we have come to realize that for the regulators, we need to be centralized. Jiao believes that regulators view Binance's current status of not having a central headquarters as dodgy. To win back regulators, the CEO explained, we need to

Starting point is 00:33:27 need to be centralized. Zhao's comments come after a slew of regulatory warnings from multiple jurisdictions, including the U.S., UK, Hong Kong, Japan, and more. Next headline, Google is going with the flow. On Wednesday, technology giant Google announced a partnership with Dapper Labs, the company behind the popular NFT project's Cryptokitties and NBA Topshot. According to Forbes, it is a multi-year deal with Google Cloud planning to act as a network operator and providing infrastructure to help scale flow, the blockchain upon which CryptoKitties and NBA TopShod exist. The new relationship should allow developers to access nodes more efficiently. Quote, it's really about helping them with rapid and sustainable growth, said Google Cloud,

Starting point is 00:34:11 North America VP, Janet Kennedy. Blockchain technology is becoming more and more mainstream, so companies like Dapper needs scalable, secure infrastructure to grow their business, and even more importantly, support their networks. The new partnership with flow is not Google's first foray into blockchain, since last year, the tech giant has been a member of the governing council of Hedera Hashgraf, a high-thruput distributed ledger. Interestingly, the Hedera Governing Council made headlines this week, too, by announcing a $5 billion ecosystem fund on Thursday, which will provide grants to accelerate the development

Starting point is 00:34:43 of Hedera's network, along with funding new partnerships and initiatives. Time for Funbits. Time Magazine celebrates Voteluk Boudarin. Time magazine named Ethereum co-founder of Vatelik Bouturin as one of the top of the top. 100 most influential people of 2021. In the profile, Reddit co-founder Alexis O'Hanian described Votelic as, quote, a builder's builder. Ohan went on to add, quote, no one person could have possibly come up with all the uses for Ethereum, but it did take one person's idea to get it started. From there, a new world has opened up and given rise to new ways of leveraging blockchain

Starting point is 00:35:19 technology. Vitonelik is not the lone member of the cryptocurrency industry and colluded in Times list. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, president of El Salvador, Naeu Buceli, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, also made the cut. All right, thanks for tuning in. To learn more about Aidan and the Salana Outage, be sure to check on the links in the show notes. Unconfirmed is produced by me, Laura Shin,

Starting point is 00:35:42 with all from Anthony Yun, Mark Murdoch, and Daniel Ness. Thanks for listening.

Unchained - Unconfirmed: Solana's Outage Lasted 17 Hours. What Does This Mean for Decentralization? - Ep.273

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