The Solana network SOL/USD malfunctioned and stopped processing transactions as it crashed earlier this Friday (Oct 1, 2022). The event marked the network’s fourth major outage since January, despite experiencing a streak of numerous outages for the majority of the month due to an ill-configured node.
The malfunctioning node led Solana Network to halt transaction processing on Friday and go offline.
But was node the only aspect behind the failed transactions? Let’s find out as we decrypt the different aspects of the event earlier this week.
ETH Killer Solana: Behind The Scenes
According to data from the platform, this was the fourth significant outage for the well-known Blockchain this year, when there had been a string of minor outages for the majority of that month.
Minutes into the outage, the Solana Foundation’s website reported ‘poor performance’ on Friday at 7:01 p.m. EST. The notice also mentioned that its engineers were working to resolve the issue. Adding to it, the platform also said that its system is unable to process transactions due to an unexpected interruption.
Previously, there was a previous 18-hour service outage in September 2021. Following the event, the No. 9 coin per market capitalization, SOL, has fallen by 81% this year due to the crypto winter.
Solana Down: Reason Behind The Disruption
According to a tweet from the Solana validator at Stakewiz.com, “it looks like a misconfigured node produced an unrecoverable split in the network.”
They further translated for Decrypt over Twitter DM: “A validator was operating a duplicate validator installation.
According to Stakewiz, the codebase was meant to resolve the current problem but resulted being an irreversible partition or fork. The Solana mainnet system was restarted at the last verified slot, 153139220, by developers who believe the malfunctioning was an accident, “possibly a failing node failover setup.” Solana had already been down for two hours and forty-five minutes at the publishing date, and the reboot remained 49% complete.
What Did Solana Say About Its Disruptions?
Decrypt emailed Solana Labs for a response to this issue, but they have yet to come back right away. While executives at Solana have had their views on the different estimates of outages in the past, the network’s founder stated that these disruptions had been Solana’s ‘curse’ and put the ecosystem at risk. Furthermore, as per Anatoly Yakovenko, the Bitcoin Blockchain would take hours to process between two blocks.
A new Solana blockchain failure
It was a difficult night for the Solana blockchain (SOL), which could not process transactions for more than 6 hours.
The Solana blockchain, regarded as an “Ethereum Killer,” is based upon the PoH (Proof of History) agreement, which, according to the developers, would allow it to enhance its scalability by optimizing its performance. Find out about Solana and what makes it special by viewing our presentation on this blockchain.
The Stakewiz validating group asserts that a validator on the Solana network was running a dual node instance, which interfered with the block generation process. Since there was just one final slot left, the blocks were effectively produced twice, making it impossible for validators to tell which block was the right one.
The blockchain, according to Stakewiz, is designed to handle this kind of issue on its own. Still, for unspecified reasons, this node issue had unanticipated consequences that eventually caused the network to come to a complete stop. However, the validators decided to restart the system at blocks 153,139,220, which was the last block confirmed before the occurrence of this incident.
The Solana Curse Of Unforeseen Failures
Coincidentally, this mishap occurred a year after a blockchain meltdown that lasted more than 18 hours and caused the network to shut down entirely. As previously indicated, this is Solana’s fourth significant outage this year alone and the ninth if instances causing partial network instability are included.
The SOL price experienced a short dip of 6% after the downtime was disclosed and is now $33.08—a 3.7% decrease over the previous 24 hours. SOL, however, continues to rank as the ninth-largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of approximately $11.7 billion.
Solana executives have argued that the counts published by different crypto media outlets were overpriced. Still, Blockchain pioneer Anatoly Yakoveneko acknowledged during an interview in October, i.e., this month, that Solana was “the curse” behind the outages.
What Recent Flaw Exists With Solana Network?
Solana’s justification for its most recent outage is simple. An unrecoverable split in the network was triggered by a misconfigured node, according to a system validator using the name Stakewiz on Twitter.
He continued by saying they were surprised the Solana codebase couldn’t resolve the problem. Developers choose to restart their mainnet network to fix the issue. Rebooting is taking some time; nearly three hours after starting, it has only advanced by 49%.
Solana has experienced seven outages since its inception in 2020, most of which occurred this year. This also takes into account a recent 17-hour production halt.
A denial-of-service attack caused by bots spamming the Raydium protocol in September 2021. In May this year, a non-fungible currency (NFT) app had bots that caused a seven-hour outage. Additionally, a programming error caused the Solana network to stop producing blocks in June.
What Consequences Does The Outage Have?
Despite frequent outages, Solana maintained its position in the top ten cryptocurrency assets in terms of market value, coming in at number nine with a total market worth of more than $11.7 billion. But soon after the outage was reported, SOL’s market price dropped.
According to data from CoinGecko, Solana ended up selling at $33.09 around press time, still struggling from the devastating weeks that left the cryptocurrency space in the red. As a result, its value has decreased by 3.5% over the last day and is now 1.8% less than seven days ago.
