Solana: Why is Solana down?

The Solana network has had at least seven full or partial outages throughout the previous year, which is not a good year for its investors. The Solana network outage that stretched for hours ultimately had a significant influence on the price of Solana (SOL). According to Coinmarketcap, the prices of SOL decreased nearly 13% in the past 24 hours.

Solana price plummets after its latest network outage

Solana, one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies by market value, fell more than 13% in the wake of a worldwide network outage that harmed its price. This was just the second major outage in a month for the network.

The Solana blockchain suffered another outage on Wednesday, 1 June 2022, when a bug caused production to come to a halt at 16:55 UTC. According to the incident report, validator operators were able to restart the mainnet after around four and a half hours by restarting it at around 21:00 UTC.

Later, Solana’s co-founder Anatoly Yalovenko went on Twitter to clarify things, stating that the previous worldwide outage was caused by a bug that prompted the nodes to generate distinct outputs, resulting in a consensus failure. He explained that because of the long-lasting nonce instruction, a portion of the network believed the block invalid, and no transactions could be processed.

The “durable transaction nonce” is a feature of the Solana protocol that addresses the typical short existence of a transaction block hash, as specified in the official documentation. A bug in the feature caused nodes to produce different outputs, resulting in consensus failure and eventually causing the most recent outage. The network was restarted with this function turned off, and Yakovenko stated that the problem would be addressed “ASAP.”

The recent network outage received a variety of community outrage, which began to pour out on Twitter soon after the network went down. Naturally, there was a lot of criticism from the community, considering the current crypto market situation. Some of the comments included sentiments like these:

Are Solana`s outages becoming the network’s new norm?

This isn’t the first time that Solana’s network has been shut down. In the past year, the blockchain has gone through nearly seven complete service outages, with some outages almost shuttering the network completely.

Although the token’s price was huge, it has continued to plunge since its network disruption. Following a recent network failure, SOL’s price has dropped approximately 14% and is now trading at $38.60. The native currency of the network is now down 85 percent from its November 2021 all-time high of $260 and looks set to fall further hence displacing it from the top 10 crypto coins by market capitalization.

According to the network uptime tracker, Solana, which has been dubbed an “Ethereum killer,” has had a tough price patch and investors’ disapproval since September 2021, when it was subject to two distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack-related outages in the same month.

A blockchain outage occurred in January when the network was plagued with problems and poor performance for nine days out of 31 in the month. Duplicate transactions were to blame for the second outage in January. Solana went down again for almost eight hours in early May.

On April 30, the network crashed after NFT minting bots—automated programs designed to exploit a new NFT project’s launch—overloaded Solana with 6 million transactions per second. To avoid that scenario in the future, Metaplex, the creators of Solana’s NFT protocol, has implemented a “bot tax” penalty.

The Solana blockchain clock is also slow, being 30 minutes behind real-world time. Moreover, the status page states that on-chain time continues to run behind that of wall clocks, owing to longer-than-normal block times.

Normally, Solana is recognized for processing up to 50,000 transactions per second, which is faster and less expensive than other networks. In the last several months, Ethereum has struggled with millions of failed-but-paid transactions due to high gas costs.

Last fall, the SOL cryptocurrency on the network rose dramatically in value. However, it has cooled off lately, along with much of the rest of the crypto market. As reported by Cryptopolitan on 2 June 2022, Solana’s price analysis is conveying bearish signals today as the price plummeted 9 percent during the past 24 hours.

If the current trend continues, the price could soon be approaching the support range at $38.65. However, buyers will also be offered a discounted rate at that point. The trading volume for Solana fell by more than 30 percent in the 24 hours since the news was announced, suggesting a bearish market for the coin.