Getting more nodes is a challenge

·         Anatoly Yakolenko says Solana’s goal is to increase network decentralisation

·         Solana suffered a network outage in September

·         SOL price touched an all-time high of $260 on 6 November

Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko says that the blockchain network needs more people to invest in running it, an unfortunate scenario at the moment as this continues to prove difficult.

Yakovenko said this at Solana’s Breakpoint Conference underway in Lisbon, Portugal, telling participants: “Talk to the validators and shake their hands, they’re actual people”

Solana can comfortably handle more than thousands of transactions per second, currently around 65,000. But to reach a higher throughput of 100,000 or higher, the network needs more validators. These are special nodes that process transactions and ensure the network runs seamlessly and fast.

However, it is expensive to be a validator due to hardware costs and the prohibitive amounts of SOL one needs to stake. Add to that the fact that there are less than 1,200 validators, ensuring a higher TPS is quite a challenge. This is what happened in September, with transaction flooding leading to a network outage that lasted several hours.

“The hard part is finding the humans that want to run the network,” the Solana exec said at Breakpoint.

According to Yakovenko, the network is focused on having more nodes join, stating that this is far more crucial than just increasing hashrate. But even with these plans in motion through a subsidy program from the Solana Foundation, the platform still finds it difficult to attract people interested in more than holding SOL or earning staking rewards.

“The challenge for us is not the technology challenge but the social challenge: How do we change behaviour on this network such that the stake and the way the voting power and how the nodes are distributed actually maximizes the Nakamoto coefficient,” Yakovenko added.

Solana is one of the hottest cryptocurrencies in the market today after a stellar 2021 that has included nearly 12,000% in price growth over the past year. It currently sits among the top five cryptocurrencies with a market cap of $74 billion.

SOL reached a new all-time high of $260 on 6 November but trades around $244 as of writing amid profit booking across the crypto market.