Solana’s mainnet faces outage, causing a 5% drop in SOL token value

Solana validators said they would restart the blockchain network’s Mainnet-Beta cluster using version 1.17.20 after an outage today, Feb. 6.

Earlier today, the Solana status page confirmed an outage on its mainnet. “Engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta,” one of the blockchain company’s official social media handles wrote.

Laine, a software and blockchain company that validates the Solana blockchain, further explained that:

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

The company added:

“Engineers are investigating and identifying a possible remediation, it is not clear yet whether a recovery is possible without a coordinated cluster restart. Consensus on the last optimistic slot has been reached at 246464040, validators are on standby for next steps as needed.”

A look at Solana’s blockchain explorer shows that the blockchain network processed its last transaction two hours ago, around 09:52 UTC.

Solana has a long history of outages, and the last of such experiences occurred during the early period of last year, according to its status page.

SOL dips

Following the news, SOL’s value dipped by around 5% to approximately $94, continuing a largely negative run that has seen it lose more than 10% during the past week, according to CryptoSlate’s data. Solana remains the sixth-largest digital asset by market capitalization despite its price dip.

Last year, the network showed huge resilience after its extensive relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the failed FTX exchange, was revealed.

This resulted in improved adoption and growth among crypto enthusiasts who flocked to the network for its cheaper and faster transactions compared to more storied rivals like Ethereum. During the last three months, Solana-based decentralized exchanges briefly outpaced those on Ethereum twice when they facilitated more daily trading activities.