On 15th May 2019 the Stellar blockchain suffered a major failure when developers took down Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) nodes. For a period of over 2 hours, the network was unable to validate any transactions as most users have put their trust in those same nodes. One could argue that XLM is having issues decentralization and the community is pushing for a debate on how this issue will be combatted.
What Caused the Stellar Network Outage?
Let’s take a step back and explain what nodes are in the first place. In the Stellar network, you have basic validator nodes or your average user and full validator nodes – the ones that actually approve transactions and maintain consensus. Full validator nodes are not that easy to establish and as such, not many in numbers. Furthermore, once you’re part of the network or you’re running your own full node, you’ll need to choose other full validator nodes that you can trust for your data needs. This is where the problem arises.
Due to the low number of nodes in general, the majority of users choose to trust the same nodes, in this case – the SDF nodes. Once those went down, the whole network seized operation and all transactions were halted over a period of 2 hours.
Stellar’s Future and Pending Measures
Seeing how XLM’s network lacks decentralization, there will need to be efforts made in that direction and the community is eager to discuss how and when changes should be made. Despite the meltdown, Stellar managed to retain its market value, however, seeing as it’s one of the top 20 cryptocurrencies to date, the dev team needs to take drastic steps towards combatting the problem at hand – long-term value and adoption depend on it.
Some commenters said that the lack of awareness of this issue was due to the network not being used that much and not having seen a real stress test. As such, even a small number of nodes going down was enough to trigger a cascade effect and bring the whole Stellar blockchain down.
It remains to be seen what kind of solution will be offered and who’ll bear the cost of fixing the apparent mistakes in the network’s inner workings. In any case, I’ll be monitoring the situation and will keep you up to date with any future developments.