Suddenly they were offline: Over 1,000 Solana validators were disconnected from the server on Wednesday. A failure of the network could be avoided, but a dangerous dependency on a few cloud providers remains. Not just at Solana.
Solana gets away with a black eye
German cloud service provider Hetzner Online blocked all Solana activity on its servers on Wednesday. Over 1,000 validators were affected. The nodes are now online again. However, the situation was not without danger for Solana. Much of the network activity went through Hetzner.
Google cloud engineer Sam Padilla according to In August, about 40 percent of the Solana network’s validators ran through Hetzner, about 20 percent of the total stake. The “highest percentage of validators was focused on Hetzner,” according to Padilla. 65 percent of staking deposits went through three providers: Hetzner, Equinix and Amazon Web Services. A contradiction to Solana’s self-promotion as the “most censorship-resistant and best-performing blockchain network in the world”.
Better an end with horror…
Whether Solana validators had to let it get that far is questionable, however. Back in September, Hetzner made his stance on crypto clear: “The use of our products for any application remotely related to mining is prohibited. This also applies to Ethereum. It includes Proof of Stake and Proof of Work and related applications.”
It was therefore not surprising that the server operator cracked down on Solana: “Our system guidelines clearly state that we do not allow cryptocurrencies on our servers, so it should not surprise you if we act,” said a previous one Circular mail from Hetzner. With the “Server program’, which connects validators to data centers, the Solana Foundation has already launched an initiative to further decentralize the network.
How independent is Ethereum?
The dependency on server service providers is, as was shown again on Wednesday, playing with fire. On which other networks such as Ethereum can burn themselves. Twelve percent of the nodes currently run via Hetzner. Only Amazon is used more often. Noisy ether nodes 58 percent of Ethereum nodes work via Amazon Web Services.
EG Galano therefore speaks of a “deplatforming risk”. Amazon and Co. would not take Ethereum offline without prior notice. But you need an “exit or backup strategy for such cases,” said the co-founder of the largest Ethereum API provider, Infura, to BTC-ECHO. The Solana incident once again underscored the urgency of such concepts.
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