Blockchain Solana experienced further difficulties this week . Indeed, it had to stop for more than 6 hours and no transaction could take place. An incident that is not the first for one of Ethereum’s fiercest competitors.
A blackout of several hours for one of the star blockchains
This Wednesday, June 1 , the Solana blockchain indeed stopped for several hours. Block production on the Mainnet Beta, the mainnet, of Solana has been halted for more than 4 hours . The project teams announced the news on Twitter shortly before 7 p.m.
A non-synchronization problem between the different validators has been detected. This generated different results for the same block and therefore forced the blockchain to stop. In the process, an emergency update was announced by the Solana teams. This update should make it possible to restart the network.
No funds were compromised but transactions on Solana had to be halted during the network outage. The network and transactions were able to resume around 11 p.m. Solana teams said:
“Validator [node] operators successfully completed the Mainnet Beta cluster restart at 21:00 UTC, after an outage of nearly 4.5 hours following the network’s failure to reach consensus. Network operators and decentralized application (dApps) managers will continue to restore customer services over the next few hours.”
Serial hiccups for Solana
This is not the first time that Solana has had problems and sometimes has to go so far as to stop its blockchain. Last January, the network experienced a slowdown and significant congestion due to numerous transactions. As a result, thousands of transactions were no longer going through, annoying many users.
The Solana Labs teams then justified:
“The Solana network is currently experiencing performance degradation due to an increase in computationally complex transactions, reducing the network’s capacity to [only] several thousand transactions per second. This causes some transactions to fail for users.”
Just last month, the multiple transactions linked to the NFT market had caused problems for the blockchain. As a reminder, Solana is behind Ethereum, the second most popular blockchain on the NFT market, especially since the integration of this technological solution by the giant OpenSea.
Solana is a blockchain recognized for its technological qualities and, in particular, its large number of transactions per second. Indeed, it is designed to absorb nearly 45,000 transactions per second, which is much more than Ethereum in its current version.
However, incidents are multiplying on the competing solution of Ethereum and annoy the crypto community. These concerns also drive the price of the SOL token a little lower. Indeed, following this new incident, the price of SOL collapsed by almost 12%. In a deteriorated market context, this news is never welcome.
As mentioned above, Solana is still in a Beta version. There is no doubt that the development teams are actively working to resolve these concerns. Still, if Solana is to establish itself as a future-proof solution, it will need to fix these issues to ensure 24/7 operation.
