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Solana wind down ‘deemed a necessity’ after low fees, says Lido Finance

October 17, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Unsustainable financials and low fees generated by Lido on Solana were two of the main reasons for the sunsetting.

Decentralized liquid staking protocol Lido Finance has announced a decision to cease operations on the Solana blockchain following a community vote in Lido’s decentralized autonomous organization.

The proposal to sunset Lido on Solana was first put forward by Lido’s peer-to-peer team on Sept. 5, citing unsustainable financials and low fees generated by Lido on Solana. Voting commenced on Sept. 29 and finished a week later on Oct. 6.

“After extensive DAO forum discussion followed by community vote, the sunsetting of the Lido on Solana protocol was approved by Lido token holders and the process will begin shortly,” Lido explained in an Oct. 16 post.

Lido will not be accepting staking requests as of Oct. 16. Voluntary node operator off-boarding will begin on Nov. 17 and Lido users will need to unstake on Solana’s frontend by Feb. 4.

“After this date, unstaking will need to be done using the CLI,” Lido added.

After extensive DAO discussion followed by community vote, the sunsetting of Lido on Solana was approved by LDO holders and will begin shortly.

More information here: https://t.co/MyImL1qpap
— Lido (@LidoFinance) October 16, 2023

The earlier proposal saw Lido seeking $20,000 per month from Lido DAO to support technical maintenance efforts involved with sunsetting operations on Solana over the next five months.

*Lido’s statement on terminating services on Solana. Source: Lido.fi*

Lido’s P2P team has been working on the Lido on Solana project since acquiring it in March 2022 from Chorus One.

Since the takeover, the P2P team has invested about $700,000 into Lido on Solana and made $220,000 in revenue, resulting in a net loss of $484,000, according to the mediakov, the author of the proposal.

The alternative in the Sept. 5 proposal was to provide more funding to Solana from Lido DAO — however 65 million (92.7%) of the 70.1 million LDO tokens (voted by token holders) were in favor of sunsetting operations on Solana instead, according to open-source voting platform Snapshot.

Lido explained the decision was a difficult but necessary one to make:

“Whilst this decision was difficult in the face of numerous strong relationships across the Solana ecosystem, it was deemed a necessity for the continued success of the broader Lido protocol ecosystem.”

Lido confirmed that staked-Solana (stSOL) token holders will continue to receive network rewards throughout the sunsetting process.

Lido’s staking services are now only supported on Ethereum and Polygon, where $14 billion and $80 million are staked, respectively, according to Lido’s website.

Lido launched on Solana on Sept. 8, 2021, when SOL was priced at $189 — an 87% fall from its current price of $24, according to CoinGecko.

Despite the news, SOL is up 8.6% over the last 24 hours.

SOL’s price movements over the last seven days. Source: CoinGecko

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Solana Labs’ ChatGPT plugin allows AI to fetch blockchain data

April 26, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Block explorer

The plugin will allow the AI chatbot to check wallet balances, transfer tokens and purchase NFTs when OpenAI makes plugins more widely available.

Solana (SOL) users will soon be able to interact with the network through an open-source plugin enabled on OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT.

The plugin will allow ChatGPT to check wallet balances, transfer Solana-native tokens and purchase nonfungible tokens (NFTs) when OpenAI makes plugins available, according to an April 25 tweet by Solana Labs, the development firm behind the Solana blockchain.

Solana Labs is also encouraging developers to test out the open-source code to retrieve on-chain data that they may be interested in.

(1/2) Solana Labs has created an open-source reference implementation for a ChatGPT plugin that lets users interact with the @solana network directly from ChatGPT.

Users will be able to check wallet balances, transfer tokens, and purchase NFTs once ChatGPT plugins are available. pic.twitter.com/08z1IX76zJ
— Solana Labs (@solanalabs) April 25, 2023

The screenshot shared by Solana Labs shows that ChatGPT can retrieve a list of NFTs owned by a particular Solana address, which shares an attached metadata link to the NFT — presumably sourced from Solana Labs' block explorer.

Solana Labs did not mention whether the plugin would be launched when OpenAI makes the plugin feature available to all.

The new ChatGPT plugins work by retrieving information from online sources and interacting with third-party websites to respond to commands requested by the user. The feature is currently being rolled out to all users.

However, not everyone is satisfied with the development.

One Twitter user asked Solana to firstly focus on developing a “working block explorer” while another questioned what benefit it would bring to the ecosystem.

It appears as though Solana Labs is now placing more focus on AI, having also announced on April 25 that it will provide $1 million in funding towards projects that build AI tools on Solana:

1/ The @SolanaFndn is now allocating grants to ecosystem teams building AI tools that use Solana. Learn more https://t.co/ntXoQgwJxC https://t.co/PEQZyqIawv
— Solana (@solana) April 25, 2023

ChatGPT users can now delete chat history

On the same day, OpenAI announced ChatGPT users can now “turn off” their chat history, thanks to a new privacy feature.

The team announced the rollout of the new feature in an April 25 statement, which was launched to provide users with more control over their data. The firm added:

“Conversations that are started when chat history is disabled won’t be used to train and improve our models, and won’t appear in the history sidebar.”

The feature can be found in ChatGPT’s settings, which can be changed at any time, OpenAI said.

OpenAI explained that deleted conversations will be retained for 30 days for the purposes of reviewing them to monitor abusive material. Once that is cleared, conversations will be permanently deleted.

The AI firm also added in a new “export” option for users to download their data and make more sense of what information ChatGPT stores.

The new privacy feature comes as Italy recently became the first European country to ban ChatGPT until it complies with the European Union’s user privacy laws pursuant to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

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Solana CEO hoses down claims network outages caused by on-chain voting

February 28, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Anatoly Yakovenko

Solana Labs founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said claims that Solana's network outages were caused by on-chain voting were born out of "pure ignorance."

Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder and CEO of Solana Labs has downplayed claims that Solana's network outages were being caused by a high volume of validator messages and its on-chain voting system clogging its consensus layer.

While the Solana Foundation confirmed in a Feb. 27 post that the “root cause” of the recent 20-hour network outage is still not clear, the CEO responded to speculation that Solana’s decision to include on-chain votes as transactions is a “massive design flaw” that has led to its many outages.

The controversial thread in question was posted by Twitter user DBCryptoX earlier on Feb. 27 days after Solana's 20-hour network outage, suggesting that the high volume of validator messages and on-chain votes were clogging the network.

1/Yesterday #Solana had another 20 hour outage

Just one of about a dozen times the ⛓️ has gone down. But why?

All part of a massive design flaw that I will try to break down in this

So let’s get into it… pic.twitter.com/KmeUPnnlZJ
— DBCryptoX ⚡️ (@DBCrypt0) February 26, 2023

However, Yankovenko in a response Tweet some 20 minutes later called the theory as coming from “pure ignorance.”

In short, he explained that the votes — which are part of a “single giant quorum” — contribute to provide an “exceptional level of security and high throughput and low fees” simultaneously.

Why are votes transactions? Every thread that I've seen that talks about this comes form pure ignorance.

Classic BFT consensus requires quadratic messaging overhead.

The more nodes you have in the same quorum, the part of the network that agrees on the state, the more messages… https://t.co/8lOhICb8mn
— toly (@aeyakovenko) February 27, 2023

However, Yakovenko didn’t exactly refute DBCryptoX’s claim that 90-95% of transactions on Solana comprise these validator messages and on-chain votes, which, DBCryptoX suggests has helped “bog down the system.”

*DBCryptoX claims that validator messages and on-chain votes are clogging up the Solana network. Source: Twitter.*

DBCryptoX also claimed that the network outages were last 20 hours because it takes considerable time for validators to meet and reach a consensus (and thus a solution) using off-chain means, such as a messaging system like Discord.

Many commentators on DBCryptoX's initial post also appear to have disagreed with their theory.

Software engineer Alex Kroeger of Solana-powered Wallet Phantom said that there is likely no singular cause of the network outages and that validators of proof-of-stake systems need a lot of network communication to achieve validation.

While the network officially restarted on late Feb. 25, it appears as though members of the cryptocurrency community are getting tired of the frequent network outages on Solana.

Cointelegraph reached out to Solana Labs for comment but didn't receive a response by the time of publication.