DeFi Users Pay the Price

While the crypto market was bleeding heavily on Friday, Solana experienced another network hiccup that caused panic among traders and DeFi users across the crypto community.

48-hour Solana Network Outage

The Solana network has suffered multiple issues within the last few months, and this current incident is the second in January. But unlike other occasions, the latest outage lasted about 48 hours.

The Solana team said they first noticed the hiccup on Friday, January 21 2022, at about 00:00 UTC.

“The mainnet-beta cluster is experiencing some performance degradation, we are currently investigating the issue,” the team wrote.

The investigation lasted more than 24 hours before the team was able to identify the cause on Saturday at 17:55 UTC.

According to the brief report on the Solana Status page, the issue was caused by “excessive duplicate transactions” done by bots.

The issue was resolved today (Sunday), at about 16:19 UTC after the release and adoption of v1.8.14, which was designed to “mitigate the worst effects of the issue.”

“These forthcoming releases are aimed at improving the state of the network, with more improvements expected to roll out in the next 8-12 weeks. Many of these features are currently live on Testnet, where they are being rigorously tested,” the team added.

Throwing Taunts and Jeers

The recent Solana network issue provided developers and non-Solana supporters another opportunity to jeer the supposed Ethereum killer.

HarperCollins’ author Mark Jeffery believes that Solana is already out of the winning blockchain of the future due to persistent network outages.

Another day, another 48 hour #Solana outage.

This is like the sixth time this has happened in 3 months.

I have zero faith in it now. It is the new EOS.

The fight is now between ETH, BSC, Fantom, Avalanche and Terra.

— Mark Jeffrey ⚡️? (@markjeffrey) January 23, 2022

Tech investor Daniel Cheung shares the same feelings:

Solana being down for 48 hours multiple times now makes me question the viability of a monolithic structure.

It’s clear the winning blockchain of the future will likely be one with a modular architecture.

Bullish $ETH 2.0 ? & Cosmos Ecosystem.

— Daniel Cheung (@HighCoinviction) January 22, 2022

DeFi Users Pay the Price

While the network issue has been resolved, DeFi users on the blockchain were left to pay the price as they faced heavy liquidations over the 48 hours the network was down.

The Solana network outage over the weekend happened at one of the worst times in the crypto market. Prices dipped in massive red, liquidation was in sight, and users were looking for ways to top up their balance to avoid forced liquidation.

Unfortunately, Solana network users who took loans with collateralized assets like SOL from lending platforms like Solend could not save their assets during the market meltdown as the blockchain struggled with congestion. A massive liquidation across the board happened next, and users were left counting their losses.

Can we all admit @solana has been down now for about ~48 hours?

Tried over 100 times to repay a Solend loan, failed.
Couldn’t even send a friend some USDC for dinner with @phantom.

It’s times like these that make you appreciate Bitcoin’s fee markets.

— Zain Allarakhia (@zallarak) January 22, 2022

But Solend said it sympathizes with users and is currently reconciling affected users.

“We’re painfully aware of the issues in which users were unable to save themselves from being liquidated due to network congestion, and are looking into reconciliation,” the Solana-based lending protocol tweeted.