While the crypto market prices are again gloomy, after a hope of return of Bitcoin (BTC) towards its highs of last May, it is one of the only cryptos still “in the green” that knows a major problem: Solana (SOL). Explanation.
The latest market rocket is said to have a saturation problem
Since Bitcoin’s prices are down again since September 7, few crypto projects were not following the BTC market in the red. The Solana blockchain (SOL) was a cheeky denouement of this movement, hitting a new all-time high on September 9, with SOL at a high of over $210.
Unfortunately, this September 14, it seems that the Solana network is experiencing significant difficulties. In the early afternoon, transaction blocks did not seem to be processed anymore, as several users on social networks quickly pointed out.
As reported by Larry Cermak, Director of Research at The Block, the block production stoppage would have occurred around 2pm (French time).
Slammed on the SOL?
The bad news was quickly confirmed by the Solana Status Twitter account, run by the Solana Foundation, as well as the first indications of the reasons for the sudden stop:
“Solana’s mainnet-beta is experiencing intermittent instability. It started about 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the problem. (…) The depletion of resources in the network is causing a denial of service, engineers are working on a solution. Validators are preparing for a potential restart if necessary.
This saturation problem was confirmed by Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, also via Twitter:
“Looks like a resource depletion similar to the one a week ago. Namely a flooding of the forwarder queue. Two thirds of these issues were supposed to be built into 1.6.23. We just needed a few days to add them before the release of 1.6.23.”
Twitter account @aeyakovenko
At the time of writing, it seems that this famous patch 1.6.23 was released in a hurry, hoping to limit this saturation problem, which it was therefore supposed to solve in good part.
Indeed, as we have seen these last weeks, decentralized finance (DeFi) has literally exploded on the Solana network, not to mention the recent arrival of transactions linked to non-fungible tokens (NFT). All the conditions seemed to be gathered to test the capacities of Solana, and it did not fail! Let’s hope that this last patch will calm down the game and allow the Solana network to come back to a normal activity.
