Cardano Founder Taunts Solana as Blockchain Records First Outage of the Year

The Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson recently reacted to the latest network outage encountered by the Solana blockchain, as engineers look to get the chain back up.

Hoskinson’s reaction involved a taunting GIF on X featuring a gamer attempting to fix issues with a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). The individual’s attempt at fixing the issue involved blowing into the cartridge of the gaming console. 

Charles Hoskinson humorously suggested that the Solana engineers could try this approach to fix the blockchain’s current outage. According to him, “this always works.”

This always works https://t.co/5kVRVGFM4l pic.twitter.com/X9yJXcETQn

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) February 6, 2024

The Cardano founder has often been observed making such taunting remarks. In December 2022, Hoskinson jokingly recommended that Solana pivot to a Cardano sidechain after a lighthearted poll in the Cardano community saw an overwhelming vote in support of the move.

Solana Suffers First Outage of the Year

Hoskinson’s latest remarks came as a response to an official statement on the recent network outage experienced by Solana. Solana Status, an X account dedicated to providing status updates on the Solana network, disclosed that they had identified the downtime, which affected the Solana mainnet-beta.

According to the disclosure, Solana engineers were already looking to resolve the issue. Shortly after the initial statement, Solana Status confirmed that the engineers were preparing to deploy a validator software update that would fix the outage, which was triggered by a pause in the cluster.

– Advertisement –

As of press time, this software update has been released. The Solana Status account instructed validators to install the latest release and restart their nodes with instructions embedded in this GitHub release.

For context, Solana experienced a major network downtime today at 10:22 (UTC). Users first observed that the blockchain had stopped producing new blocks for minutes. This pattern was unconventional, as the network handles multiple blocks in seconds.

Prominent Solana validator Laine confirmed the outage in a post on X, noting that the blockchain was experiencing a “performance degradation.” The validator resource has continued to divulge updates on the situation. The network is still suffering the outage as of press time.

Solana Mainnet-Beta is experiencing a performance degradatation, block progression is currently halted, core engineers & validators are actively investigating.

— Laine ❤️ stakewiz.com (@laine_sa_) February 6, 2024

The situation has impacted exchanges as well, with Upbit announcing a suspension of deposits and withdrawals for the native Solana token and other assets on the network, including Access Protocol (ACS), Raydium (RAY) and GMT (GMT).

Efforts at Resolution

A monitoring tool provided by Laine’s Stakewiz platform now presents progress on the network restart. At the reporting time, the active stake currently stands at 41.55%. The network is expected to restart fully once the bar hits 80%. 

The latest outage is the first for this year, and comes nearly a year after the network suffered a similar downtime in February 2023, which lasted for over 18 hours.

The network also recorded multiple outages in 2022 across several months, with January 2022 alone witnessing nine days of outages. This led to concerns around its reliability. As of press time, SOL is down 4.46%, currently trading for $93.79.