So, the Solana (SOL) network had an outage yesterday - and depending on who you listen to it's either:

A) The worst thing in the world and yet another reason to never touch SOL.

or

B) No biggie.

The reality of the situation, like with most things, sits somewhere in the middle of each extreme.

So let's go over what happened and figure out where we're at.

First up, it should be said that these outages ain't great. A cryptocurrency that is gunning to become a global currency network can't keep going down forever (and this is the fourth time Solana has done so this year).

When things grow fast, they tend to break in places - the question is, can they be fixed?

The good news is, to date, Solana has been able to address and solve each of the issues that have plagued them in the past.

And outages like this aren't too shocking when you consider that Solana's whole approach is to push blockchain technology to its limits (the end goal being to bring 1 billion people into Web3).

And so far, they're doing a pretty decent job of it - SOL currently has more daily active users than its biggest competitor (Ethereum) and its usage is rising fast.

SOL's share of NFT trading volume has gone from 7% of all NFT trades, to 24% over the past 6 weeks.

...and Solana's overall transaction numbers are number NUTS - it has already processed 100B transactions since it launched in 2020.

(For context, Ethereum launched in 2015 and has processed 1.7B transactions to date):

So, yeah - these outages absolutely need to stop.

But to expect a new technology to scale at such a rate, without some hiccups along the way? That ain't happening.

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