Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, spoke to Cointelegraph at the ETH Denver conference on network outages, the impact of regulation, and the launch of mobile devices.
Speaking to Cointelegraph on March 1, Federa said the New York Department of Financial Services – NYDFS, one of the state regulators responsible for licensing crypto companies – is actually creating roadblocks for many projects that want to issue stablecoins or similar blockchain services. He added that Solana has heard from the project that it faces “pretty draconian” rules in the European Union related to the responsibility of illegal transactions.
“DFS has not certified Solana,” Federa said. “We are trying to get it in the way, but I think what we have seen is a lack of appetite from DFS anywhere. If a new participant — for example, a large financial services web2 company — feels that they want to start issuing stablecoins, they feel that they need the approval of DFS to do so.
In response to the recent slowdown in block production that caused Solana’s network to restart, Federa said “no specific root cause analysis” was reported by the team’s engineers. He added that there was “something about the interaction” between network versions 1.13 and 1.14 or in the latest attempt to upgrade that forced the validator to restart.
“It’s about 1.14, it was running on the testnet for a month before actually migrating to maintenance,” said Federa. “So, what it really highlights is that the test infrastructure for the release is not strong enough as it should be now because it is not like that, you know, thrown into the main net. It is not willing. Only the test does not find out what this error is.
Federa said that Solana’s approach is to develop an ecosystem faster in a matter of months than networks like Ethereum take years. He added that many projects are hurting for venture capital funds amid a bear market and negative press coverage related to crypto and blockchain, with stability being a key factor in user retention.
“One of the risks is downtime and so there is a sacrifice of stability to get more stuff out quickly to help the network grow faster.”
The root cause of the 2-25-23 blackout remains unknown and is under active investigation. The document below will be updated as new information becomes available https://t.co/kKYaTuizu0
– Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) February 27, 2023
The collapse of FTX in November 2022 created ripples that also affected Solana’s mobile device ambitions. According to Federa, Solana has temporarily scrubbed the ‘tap to pay’ fiat to crypto feature without replacing FTX – the firm is expected to facilitate transactions – but plans to launch it in “the first or second week of April”.
related: Solana State: Will the layer-1 protocol rise again in 2023?
Many on social media have criticized Solana for network outages, with various causes including a denial of service attack in 2021, a bottleneck from a non-working token editing bot in May 2022, and a consensus failure in June 2022. The latest cause of the outage. was still unknown at the time of publication, but Solana Labs founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said it was not the result of clogging the network’s voting system.