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Why One Solana Builder Is Still Optimistic About the Network
Lucas Bruder, the CEO of Jito Labs, which builds infrastructure for Solana, says despite the outages, the blockchain still has a lot going for it.
ABOUT
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
On Tuesday, Solana suffered a network outage, just shy of a year since its last shutdown. The blockchain had to quickly get a new version out and notify its validators to upgrade to it and restart their systems before blocks could be produced again, resulting in downtime of roughly five hours. This was previously something that had happened regularly to the blockchain but seemed to have been largely addressed over the past year.
Lucas the CEO of Jito Labs, which builds infrastructure for Solana and staged a highly successful airdrop last year that helped rejuvenate the blockchain, joined Unchained to discuss what caused the outage, whether it’s something that builders on Solana should be concerned about for the future, recent improvements Solana has made to its technology, whether the implementation of Firedancer would have prevented this incident, and the promise of the Solana phone.
Show highlights |
- What caused the Solana blockchain’s outage this week
- Whether Solana needs to have better quality control
- Whether the halt of the network affects the builders in the space
- What recent developments in the infrastructure surrounding Solana give Lucas confidence in the network
- Whether the Firedancer client that’s now in development would have prevented this week’s outage
- The promise of the Solana phone
- Whether the network going down presents a setback for the Solana community in terms of recognition and momentum
- Whether financial companies will consider using Solana if these issues keep occurring
Thank you to our sponsors! Popcorn Network | iTrustCapital | Polkadot
Guest |
Lucas Bruder, CEO of Jito Labs
Links |
Recent coverage of Unchained on Solana:
Jupiter Founder Meow to Critics of JUP Airdrop: ‘Give Me a Break’
Three Crypto Pioneers on Crypto’s Monolithic vs. Modular Debate
Anatoly Yakovenko on Solana’s Astounding Recovery and Its Future Plans
Outage:
Unchained: Solana Back Online Again After Suffering 5-Hour Outage
Matthew Sigel’s explanation for why the outage happened
Mert’s tweet on how Solana prioritizes security over liveness
CoinDesk: Can We All Stop Pretending That Solana Is in Beta?
Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC. Distributed by CoinDesk. Senior Producer is Michele Musso and Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz.
HOST
Laura Shin is a crypto journalist, host of the Unchained podcast, and author of “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” (Public Affairs, 2022). Formerly a senior editor at Forbes, she was the first mainstream journalist to cover crypto full-time, and her podcasts and videos have had more than 15 million downloads and views. Shin has spoken about cryptocurrency at places such as TEDx San Francisco, the International Monetary Fund, Singularity University and the Oslo Freedom Forum.
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Stanford University and has a master of arts from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She lives in New York City.

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