Stellar's Blockchain Briefly Goes Offline, Confirming the Project Lacks Decentralization

Recently, blockchain-powered network Stellar stopped confirming transactions for more than one hour, effectively going offline.

To reach global consensus with other nodes, Stellar Core runs the Stellar Consensus Protocol.

The Stellar Development Foundation - a nonprofit organization committed to the development and adoption of Stellar - believes that the network collapsed because "New nodes took on too much consensus responsibility too soon." Alternatively, as Nicolas Barry, chief technology officer of Stellar, put it, "It was caused by being too decentralized too fast."

Last month, three researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology published a paper titled "Is Stellar As Secure As You Think?" concluding that the analysis of the Stellar network proves that it "Is significantly centralized."

On May 15, at 1:14 p.m. PST, the Stellar network went offline for 67 minutes - according to SDF, while some other reports mentioned "Approximately two hours" - after it failed to reach consensus.

"We've seen claims that Stellar is 'over-centralized' and that somehow a failure with SDF's nodes dragged down the whole network. Ironically, the opposite is true. Stellar has added many new nodes recently. In retrospect, some new nodes took on too much consensus responsibility too soon."

SDF claimed that stopping the network is in fact a preferable scenario for Stellar over operating in a faulty state, since the network accommodates financial institutions who supposedly chose it since they "Prefer downtime over inconsistent data." That is why the Stellar protocol didn't fail, but actually worked as intended, the nonprofit organization argued.

When asked whether the Stellar network could be called a decentralized one after the incident, Hartej Sawhney, a blockchain expert and co-founder of Hosho, replied negatively, but clarified that no project is decentralized today, as the concept has yet to be properly implemented.

"At this point we of time, Stellar is definitely a centralized network, especially in terms of the liveness aspects, as it was demonstrated in a research done at KAIST," Eyal Shani, a blockchain researcher at Aykesubir, agreed.

Time will tell if the nonprofit manages to reinforce its network to prevent further closedowns, but for now, Stellar could be joining the ranks of other major crypto projects that are criticized for a lack of decentralization.