Solana investors are nursing double-digit losses today following yet another period of downtime. The blockchain went offline at around 16:55 UTC on Wednesday after a bug prevented block production.
Solana Suffers Four-Hour Outage
Solana is not having a great year having suffered its seventh outage in 2022.
On Twitter, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and other developers attributed the outage on Wednesday to a bug in the blockchain’s durable nonce transactions feature. This resulted in non-determinism, meaning that various nodes generated different results for the same block and no consensus could be reached.
According to the Solana status page, the network was down for four hours and ten minutes as validators were able to successfully restart the mainnet at around 21:00 UTC.
The network and user funds remained secure as the durable nonce feature was disabled in order to bring the network back online. Yakovenko noted that the changes to combat this issue are coming soon.
Solana has become synonymous with frequent outages and congestion in recent months as the “Ethereum Killer” becomes a popular platform for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi). Investors have been flocking to the network because of its low transaction fees and notable scalability.
The most recent incident happened on April 30 when NFT minting bots overwhelmed the blockchain with a flood of transactions. At least seven other episodes happened before Wednesday’s outage, including a 47-hour-long clog earlier this year, two hiccups in Dec. 2021, and a denial of service attack last September.
SOL Tanks 12%
Even if the broader crypto market is down considerably today, dropping 4.79% in total market capitalization, SOL has registered a bigger price drop than many of its peers.
As of now, the Ethereum rival is down 11.70% in the last 24 hours at a current price of $39.64, per CoinMarketCap. This is a steep drop from the all-time high above $259.96 set in November 2021.
Although it has been predicted that the Solana blockchain could one day become the “Visa of the digital asset ecosystem,” the persistent outages continue to hamper full network utilization in the meantime and scare away some potential investors, thus stunting the ecosystem’s growth.
