Early in the night, the Solana blockchain (SOL) found itself unable to finalize blocks on its network. The cause was a misconfigured validator node combined with an as yet unresolved problem in the blockchain’s code. However, the network has since been relaunched, and the various services and decentralized applications (dApps) should be operational in the next few hours.
New failure for the Solana blockchain
The Solana blockchain (SOL) had a difficult night, as it stopped processing transactions for more than 6 hours.
Considered as an “Ethereum Killer”, the Solana blockchain relies on a Proof of History (PoH) consensus, which, according to its creators, would allow it to optimize its performance in order to maximize its scalability. You can discover more about Solana and what makes it unique on our presentation dedicated to this blockchain.
“The Solana network is experiencing a failure and is not processing transactions. Ecosystem developers are working to diagnose the problem and restart the network. More information will be provided as soon as it becomes available.”
According to the Stakewiz validator group, a validator on the Solana network was operating a dual node instance, causing a malfunction in the production of blocks. In effect, the blocks were being produced twice, and the validators could no longer determine which block was the correct one since, of course, there was only one final slot available.
According to Stakewiz, the blockchain is set up to solve this kind of problem on its own, but for reasons still unknown, this node problem had unexpected repercussions, to the point of bringing the entire network to a halt.
Nevertheless, the validators agreed to restart the network at block 153,139,220, the last block validated before this incident began.
Solana, the curse of unexpected failures
Coincidentally, this mishap comes one year after a breakdown of more than 18 hours on the blockchain, during which the network was completely stopped.
In the current year alone, this is the 4th major outage for Solana, and the 9th if we also consider incidents causing partial instability of the network.
The SOL price was briefly affected, observing a 6% drop after the outage was announced, with the current price at $33.08, which is a 3.7% drop over the past 24 hours. SOL, however, still sits as the 9th largest cryptocurrency with over $11.7 billion in market capitalization.
While Solana executives have in the past criticized the counts made by various crypto media outlets, arguing in particular that they were overvalued, blockchain founder Anatoly Yakoveneko admitted in an interview this month that the outages were “the curse” of Solana.
