The crypto market is experiencing what can be described as its lowest low since its last bullish run. All leading coins have dipped massively, dragging all other Altcoins down the drain. Solana, the 9th largest cryptocurrency on the market cap, didn’t survive this dip. Solana has fallen from its all-time high of $260 and it is currently worth $37. This elongated bearish mode has made investors lose billions of their investments and it has also made the Solana-based NFT space less lucrative.
This recent price crash was triggered by what has been described as the 8th failure of the Solana network, coupled with the reduced demand for Solana-based NFTs.
According to Solana status, there was an outage on the Solana blockchain which lasted for about 4 hours. While this was announced, validators were advised to prepare for a restart in “mb-validators” on discord. During this outage, transactions couldn’t be conducted and this led to the fall in price.
Apart from this outage, interest in Solana NFTs also plummeted. According to Crytoslam, the overall sales of Solana-based NFTs dropped by 61.30% to $1.72 Million. From the data obtained from Opensea, Okay Bears, a Solana-based NFT, showed the decreased interest from users as the 24 hours trading volume dropped by 44.40%. Other Solana-based NFTs have also shown a decrease in the interest of users as their trading volume has reduced drastically.
Even though Solana boasts of its speedy transactions and low transaction fees because of its ability to carry out 50,000 transactions per second, it has been suffering from consecutive outages.
Focusing on the Solana blockchain outage, it has been established that the most recent is not the first of its kind. This outrage has happened twice this year. One in January and the other in June. This most recent outage was a result of a bug in the durable nonces transactions features. Two validator nodes came up with different results for the same block and this stopped the network from advancing. It was until the team of engineers released a new version that disabled the features of the durable transaction that the network was up and running.
Also on the 14th of September 2021, Solana suffered another network outage which lasted for about 17 hours. The major cause of this was the bots generating transactions during a protocol launch. The bots overloaded the memory of the network and this made validators unable to reach an agreement. This had similarity to a non-malicious DDoS attack. A similar attack also happened in January 2022 which lasted for 7 consecutive days.
As of June 2021, Solana’s record has shown that there have been 8 major outages and 20 periods of degraded performance since inception.
With the aforementioned, it can be seen that the Solana blockchain has struggled to provide 100% uptime and this is because of the challenges that accompany its mode of operation. Some of these problems are: the improper creation of forks by nodes as a result of the inability of updates to sync, the inability of transactions to indicate the correct time, duplicated transactions and the RPC being spammed.
