On Tuesday, the Solana Mainnet-Beta encountered a downtime in block production, leading to the network being halted for a while. The outage led to SOL experiencing a significant price dip.
Solana (SOL) stooped to as low as $93.36 before rebounding to $93.70, marking a 4% decline for the day and over an 11% decrease for the week.
Solana Mainnet Suffers Outage Leading To Exchanges Suspending SOL Transactions
The outage was related to issues on the mainnet-beta cluster, which prompted the blockchain’s core engineers and validators to spring into action and investigate the issue. The Solana Blockchain Explorer also confirmed the issue at 10:22 UTC on February 6.
Users observed no block production on Solana for over 25 minutes, which is a significant delay as the blockchain is considered one of the fastest with a block production time of 400 milliseconds.
As soon as Solana went down, prominent validator “stakewiz” reported that core engineers were working on a software update with remedial measures. Meanwhile, other validators had generated snapshots of their local ledger state in preparation for a restart.
Later in the day, Solana’s network status account on X (formerly Twitter) announced the release of a new validator software v1.17.20 aimed at resolving the issue that caused the mainnet-beta cluster to halt.
Solana’s outage affected many cryptocurrency exchanges, with some platforms suspending deposits and withdrawals of Solana-based tokens, including SOL, GMT, Raydium (RAY), and Access Protocol (ACS).
Solana Has Experienced 11 Outages In Under 2 Years
This isn’t an isolated event. The network was faced with a similar challenge in February 2023, causing it to go down for nearly 20 hours. At the time, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko expressed confidence in the forthcoming ‘Firedancer’ client as a long-term solution to the outages.
However, the latest outage underscores the ongoing efforts to enhance Solana’s resilience.
In November, an early version of a new validator client software codenamed ‘Frankendancer’, was introduced on a testnet. Core engineers plan on transitioning the client to the Solana mainnet later this year.
Crypto infrastructure company Jump Crypto, which is developing the Firedancer, aims to have the client operational as a fully independent validator on the mainnet by the end of 2024. The goal of the new update is to provide network validators with backup software options to mitigate potential issues with the primary client.
This was the 11th outage on Solana in the last two years. The blockchain launched in March 2020, has been faced with recurring network issues that have led to multiple restarts.
Solana DEX Trading Activity Briefly Surpasses Daily Volumes On Ethereum
Despite the setbacks, Solana has gained massive prominence over the years due to its promise of a highly scalable decentralized ecosystem that threatens Ethereum (ETH) – the world’s largest smart contract-based blockchain.
Network activity on the blockchain surged last week, with trading volume on Solana-based decentralized exchanges (DEXs) briefly surpassing that of exchanges on Ethereum. There was also excitement surrounding the launch of popular Solana DEX Jupiter’s native token JUP. Jupiter is the largest decentralized finance (DeFI) platform in the Solana ecosystem.
At the time of writing, SOL is trading at $95.64 – up 0.5% in the last 24 hours. During that time, the network recorded a trading volume of $1.79 billion, which is an indication of its massive popularity in the crypto community.
