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Transactions on Solana, the crypto market’s fifth biggest coin with a market cap of $41billion, are at a standstill as developers continue to address a network breakdown on its live blockchain today, 6 February.
Engineers behind the scenes of the Solana ecosystem have been investigating the cause of the outage on the mainnet-beta, while reaching the consensus to restart the network.
Solana Network disruption
According to an update earlier today: “Engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta. This thread will be updated as more information becomes available.”
In the past hour, an official tweet on X stated: “Engineers from across the ecosystem are readying a new validator software release, which includes a patch to address an issue which caused the cluster to halt. Validator operators should prepare for an upgrade and restart of the network.”
As per the most recent tweet from Solana validator Laine: “25% of stake is back online, at 80% the chain restarts.”
First Solana Network outage in 282 days
Solana is known for its frequent network outages. The latest Solana network breakdown follows a two-day-long disruption in late April of last year.
At the time, Solana developers explained that millions of transactions per second and heavy traffic contributed to the network’s disruption.
An official update revealed: “An enormous amount of inbound transactions (6 million per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100 Gbps of traffic at individual nodes. There is no evidence of a denial of service attack, but instead evidence indicates bots tried to programatically win a new NFT being minted using the popular Candy Machine program.
“Since the mint price had a fixed floor and not a dynamic Dutch auction, the first user to call the mint received the NFT, which created an economic incentive to send a huge number of transactions in hopes of winning the mint.”
The latest Solana network outage illustrates the constant challenges in managing a complex decentralized blockchain platform.
SOL price drops
At the time of writing, the price of the Solana token SOL has dropped by more than 3.4% and is currently trading at $94.12.
This is 63% down from its all-time high of $260.06 reached more than two years ago on 6 November 2021, according to CoinMarketcap.
