Solana Mainnet Beta Stalls For Hours After Transaction Overload
Over the past 24 hours, the price of Solana has fallen by almost 9% after its network protocol suffered its first significant technical glitch. Updates from on-chain metrics, cryptocurrency forums, and social media platforms including Solana’s official status twitter account, all point towards the fact that the Solana blockchain did stall for some hours.
Data from several Solana block explorers has revealed that a large portion of the transactions which users attempted to carry out on the blockchain failed to go through in the later part of yesterday and Wednesday morning.
Transactions Cease On Solana
There are suggestions that the platform might have faced the same issues a week ago, albeit on a much smaller scale and in fleeter durations. However, Solana’s glitch on September 14th and 15th meant the entirety of Solana’s protocol experienced failure, with no transaction successfully written onto the blockchain while the glitch happened.
“I’m locked out of my Solana,” reads a tweet from a Twitter user, MattyG, “unable to connect to Solana and no help anywhere on your website that makes sense to someone that doesn’t know advanced coding. I shouldn’t need to reconfigure my computer to access my Solana”.
The Solana Mainnet Beta stopped completely for more than twelve hours. The system malfunction means not only were some Solana traders affected, crypto protocols and apps built on Solana had major problems as well, including Pyth, one of the highest-profile applications, which feeds DeFi projects price data on stocks, cryptocurrencies, and other assets from the world’s biggest trading firms.
Solana Foundation has revealed via a statement on Twitter that the temporary system malfunction was caused by an overload in the number of transactions, with the network peaking at more than 400,000 transactions per second yesterday.
The many transactions overwhelmed the transaction processing queue and without an ordered system in place for network-critical messaging, the entire network began forking. This caused excessive memory consumption which in turn resulted in certain nodes going offline.
Solana’s revelation despite causing a protocol glitch was seen as a positive for quite many Solana devotees who claimed Solana’s numbers and traction could rival Visa and MasterCard at this point.
Network Restarted
45 minutes into the problem engineers had begun looking into it and following its discovery, they had attempted to solve what the Solana Status account referred to as intermittent instability, however, they were not successful.
Certain individuals have speculated that the necessary repairs could take anywhere between 24 to 48 hours to be completed. Not too long after, the Solana Foundations stated that the validator community had decided to launch a reboot of the network, and more information concerning their plans would be posted onto its Discord server.
Other Twitter users expressed doubts that the newly launched protocol would be able to deal with institutional-grade traffic if the system should fail again, even after getting rebooted. However, Solana is just one more in a list of networks that have stalled and been unable to produce blocks in the past. Other blockchain platforms include Cardano and IOTA which were down for longer than 14 days.
Solana has softly bounced back since its dip, trading at $159.13 at the time of writing.
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