Solana Founder Praises Cardano’s Design Following Chain Split Recovery

Cardano’s handling of its chain split has drawn admiration from key ecosystem players, who praise its resiliency in the face of bugs. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko hailed Cardano’s design, but despite the swift recovery, several critics have taken swipes at the network over low user metrics.

Anatoly Yakovenko Hails Cardano’s Design

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko praised Cardano’s network design and its handling of the recent chain split. Yakovenko shared his thoughts in an X post, noting that the network showed resilience, functioning as designed despite the activation of a bug.

The Solana co-founder pointed to the near-perfect design of the Cardano network, highlighting its Bitcoin-like consensus mechanism but without the heavy computational requirement. Yakovenko disclosed that achieving Bitcoin’s security standard without Proof-of-Work is an impressive feat in its own right.

“I am gonna go out on a limb and actually say this is pretty cool,” said Yakovenko in response to an X post on Cardano’s recovery. “Nakamoto-style consensus without proof of work is extremely hard to build. The protocol functioned as designed.”

In contrast to Bitcoin, Cardano leans on Ouroborous, a Proof-of-Stake model, designed to be energy efficient with epochs and slots deployed for orderly block production. Meanwhile, the network design allows the “honest chain” to win in the event of a split, stifling the growth of the “wrong chain.”

Advertisement  

Last week, Cardano suffered a temporary chain split, resulting in two competing versions of the network. Within hours, ecosystem players formed a joint incident squad to ship patched software, effectively resolving the split.

During the incident, Cardano continued block production, with some users experiencing a slowdown. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed that the upcoming Leios upgrade will “lock in this level of resilience,” improving the network’s security standards.

Pushing To Prosecute The Mastermind

An incident report revealed that the team has identified the bad actor behind the malicious transaction that triggered the chain split. Despite a public apology from the actor, Hoskinson disclosed that the team is treating the incident as “potentially malicious,” noting that the individual bypassed all active bug bounty and responsible disclosure programs.

Meanwhile, Yakovenko urged Hoskinson not to send law enforcement authorities after the bad actor, stating that it may have a “chilling effect” on the entire ecosystem. However, Hoskinson refused his request, noting that the attack was premeditated and the bad actor did not own up to the act until he was exposed.

“It was a premeditated attack by a disgruntled SPO with extensive knowledge of Cardano and who had already observed the testnet fork, the patch efforts, and was in direct contact with the core devs,” said Hoskinson.