Sam Bankman-Fried Addresses Solana Shutdown

Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX CEO and major investor in Solana, addressed the blockchain’s inability to process transactions last week.

Last week, the Solana network experienced an outage for over 17 hours due to a transaction overload. According to Bankman-Fried, the issue stemmed from “resource exhaustion” in the network, which was eventually restarted. Bots competing to buy various coins flooded the network with roughly 400,000 transactions per second, which triggered the reboot. 

Bankman-Fried said that amount is 10 times as many as any public blockchain in the world can support right now. Additionally, he acknowledged that testing the limits is a necessary part of massively scaling up a blockchain. 

“I also think part of progress is testing the limits and seeing what happens and improving,” Bankman-Fried said. “If you never do that, the industry might never get to a place where it’s able to scale to support large protocols.” Due to the incident, the price of Solana’s native token SOL fell 10% by the end of last week.

FTX plans for NFTs

In the same conversation with Bloomberg, FTX.US President Brett Harrison discussed the crypto exchange’s plans for non-fungible tokens (NFT). FTX.US launched its own NFT marketplace earlier this month. Harrison commented that the company was in a good place to do so because its infrastructure is already well developed.

Although they can already mint, list, and trade NFTs, FTX would like to enable users to import them from other projects. “I think we’re very close on it,” Harrison said, estimating it’s about a month out from becoming available. Due to its robust framework, the exchange is set up for an easy expansion, he added. 

“Our exchange can handle more than just NFTs,” he said. “When you think about maybe the scale of NFTs, however many transactions per second, however much volume per day on our exchange and, again, lends itself to making sure that we can build an NFT exchange that can scale to the number of bids, the number of auctions that are going to eventually occur on all these exchanges, I think it means that we’re well-positioned to make a very solid competitor to OpenSea.”  

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