Solana experienced a network outage for over 17 hours on Tuesday due to a transaction overload, affecting its price. This is the second time the mainnet has hit a snag this month. So, what exactly is happening with Solana?
Solana’s intermediate instability
Despite being one of this year’s fastest-rising cryptocurrencies, Solana has been experiencing some “intermediate instability” on its blockchain network. According to the Solana Status account tweets, the mainnet beta had a significant increase in transaction load peaking at 400,000 transactions per second, which flooded the processing queue, eventually causing some nodes to go offline.
The prolonged downtime affected the crypto’s price causing it to drop by 13%, according to CoinGecko data.
The company further said the outage was a result of resource exhaustion on the network. However, the development team shared an update that they had coordinated a successful network restart with the validator community to resolve these issues.
After the restart, the Solana team informed the users that all the block explorers and all other supporting systems will be back up in the next several hours, which should also restore full functionality.
However, this is not the first time Solana is experiencing this kind of network instability. On Sept 2, the blockchain shared a similar statement after experiencing intermittent performance degradation that lasted approximately 1 hour.
As a result of the snag,
- Some users reported that their funds were stuck.
- Crypto protocols that are built on top of the Solana blockchain, such as Pyth, had problems connecting to the network.
- Solana-based wallet Phantom also reported that it was having trouble connecting.
So, what’s causing these network outages?
It’s not uncommon for blockchain networks to experience network problems and disruptions. For instance, when Solana was going through downtime, Ethereum layer-2 chain Arbitrum also suffered a temporary hour-long outage.
With Solana, the mainnet is still in beta mode; therefore, it hasn’t been tested in a live setting. These outages are most likely a result of the experimental nature of the blockchain technology.
The Way Forward
Over the past 30 days, the price of Solana has more than doubled. However, the coin has lost momentum in the past six days and is now trading at $162. With the recurring outages, it’s unclear how this will affect the SOL coin. Some of the time-sensitive projects could be severely affected by blockchain problems.
