solana, the network that has the trump and melania memecoins on it, has completely seized up after hitting around 800 transactions per second. users are reporting 5+ hour delays in withdrawing SOL and USDC from CEX onto this network. coinbase has started to just cancel all of the stuck transactions. the largest DEX aggregator on the network is also shitting itself.

the solana developers lied about the performance of the network. they are claiming that it can handle thousands of TPS in the marketing materials but it is unable to deliver acceptable performance before it even hits 1000. the same marketing materials claim it has thousands (plural) of validators but the real number is slightly north of 1000, because it requires enterprise grade hardware to run a validator. these validator nodes are struggling to keep up even when run by seasoned professionals, as evidenced by the CEX issues.

this is just reinforcing my belief that big block scaling is not going to work. the solana developers shunned layered architecture and stuck with big blocks because it was the easy path. they were rightfully afraid of confusing their users with different layers and they built it as all one thing. this ended up destroying the user experience anyway.

you need layered architecture. the challenge is in building second layer scaling solutions that don't suck for the user. it should be easy and safe, and ideally the user shouldn't even notice that there are different layers. bitcoin and ethereum are the only two cryptocurrencies that are actively focusing on layered architecture and neither one is quite there yet. one or two UX issues are all it takes for people to disengage and go with a custodian or an altcoin.