The Stellar Lumens (XLM) network is receiving some criticism regarding its decentralization after the network went down for 2 hours when nodes on the network went down for various reasons.
The network went down fat 16:15 PM ET on May 16. At the time, the network could not reach consensus and validate transactions.
Blockchain industry insiders have also been commenting on the incident,
If your entire network is going down because a single entity had a problem, exactly how decentralized can your system be? That's right: not at all.https://t.co/6cEWPTPXYc
— Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) May 16, 2019
Note that, while Ripple and Stellar have some protocol similarities, they differ in their network structure. In the battle between Ripple and Stellar, a clear winner may be emerging.
— Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) May 16, 2019
Speaking to The Block, Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Stellar said,
Over the last months we have worked to get people to not depend on the SDF nodes. As of maybe a month or so ago the SDF nodes could safely go down and the network would continue. But this also means that the network can halt even if the SDF nodes are still running. Unfortunately this is what happened.
Stellar CTO, Nicolas Barry, said that the team was looking into the matter and more details would be offered soon. He also said,
All I can say right now is that it was caused by being too decentralized too fast and the system behaved the right way by halting.
