Cryptocurrency network Solana, which claims to be an “Ethereum killer”, has been left out of business once again after a single validator brought down the entire network, leaving all transactions in limbo. Despite its growing popularity, Solana suffered a series of outages throughout 2021 and 2022, going down at least 8 times. The most recent interruption, which occurred this Friday (30), was the fourth since January this year. In June, Solana suffered an outage for more than four hours. In another blackout, the coin was paralyzed for about 18 hours. At all times, traders’ portfolios recorded a large decline as they were unable to move their assets. At the beginning of the year, cryptocurrency investors had to face a series of disruptions, which kept happening at different time intervals for several months.
Solana down (again)
As the network stopped processing transactions on Friday, developers said that Solana was not processing transactions. They said they were working on diagnosing the problem and restart the network.
On the coin’s official website, information was posted stating that the network was experimenting “degraded performance” and that the developers were working to identify and fix the problem. Shortly after this update, Solana issued another update, reporting that the network was experiencing a complete outage and not being able to process transactions.
“The Solana network is experiencing an outage and is not processing transactions. Developers across the ecosystem are working to diagnose the issue and restart the network. More information will be provided as it becomes available.”
Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 7 AM UTC. Network operators an dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours. — Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) October 1, 2022
Validator caused interruption
Solana validators tweeted about the incident, claiming that a misconfigured node was behind the network failure.
“It appears that a misconfigured node has caused an unrecoverable partition on the network. A validator was running a duplicate instance of the validator. That is, when it was their turn to produce a block, they would produce one of each instance, for the same slot, so some validators saw a block, others others, so they couldn’t agree which one was correct.”
A Solana developer, Laine, reported in a tweet that the network should be restarted, stating that they require 80% participation to successfully complete the restart.
Solana Mainnet restart is underway, we need 80% of stake to restart. Track it here: https://t.co/2tIgKBCAHO — Laine ❤️ stakewiz.com (@laine_sa_) October 1, 2022
Solana suffers curse, says creator
As the network reset could take 2 hours, the price of the SOL token dropped by 5%, a high value when considering that the coin has already lost 81% of its value year-to-date. Solana, self-proclaimed Ethereum killer, is losing the faith of crypto investors. However, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of the coin, said that network outages are a curse.
“That’s been, I think, our curse, but it’s because the network is so cheap and fast that there are enough users and apps that are driving it.”
The coin has seen at least eight outages since its launch in 2020, with five of them occurring in 2022 alone. One of the longest outages lasted 18 hours in September 2021. Solana has become a popular blockchain for creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs). ) and decentralized applications (dApps). After Ethereum’s successful transition to Proof-of-Stake, Solana became the third largest Proof-of-Stake blockchain behind only Ethereum and Cardano. However, the network will need to resolve its outage issues if it wants to ‘kill’ Ethereum.
