On February 25, the Solana (SOL) network encountered a serious issue that limited users’ capacity to carry out transactions.
The network underwent a forking event that resulted in numerous copies of its transaction history, impeding its ability to function in ways like cryptocurrency trading and asset transfers.
By 00:53 New York time, the crisis began, quickly escalating. Although the cause of the forking event is still being investigated by Solana engineers and validators, it is still not obvious.
The Solana network started to suffer as a result of the forking event because validators’ RAM use increased. The amount of transactions the network could execute per second decreased as transaction throughput dropped precipitously.
The data site for Solana noted a drop in transaction rate from 5000 TPS to roughly 93 TPS.This is not the first time Solana has had a problem like this; in 2022 and 2021, it endured numerous outages.
After the earlier outages, the blockchain had modified its systems to control incoming traffic; nevertheless, there was no apparent cause for the most recent occurrence.
The present network issues are most likely caused by a flaw in the brand-new Solana code that had only gone live hours before the incident. Without a workable answer, validators started reverting to the earlier version in an effort to increase Solana’s throughput.
Later, Solana staff members endorsed this action. The supermajority of validators may not switch back to the old program for several hours, though. Moreover, there is no assurance that the downgrade will succeed.
The price of Solana has decreased by almost 4% since then, and it is currently trading at $22.65, which is not far from its 24-hour low. It is unclear whether the Solana blockchain will recover, and if so, whether this will result in a rise in the altcoin’s price.
Industry experts have responded to this most recent Solana forking incident. In order to make spamming less profitable, St. Gnu, a pseudonymous validator, suggested that the core developers include more charge features.
Even with priority fees, he contends that the network is too cheap to conduct business on. The problem is that if a user wants to flood the network with transactions, it doesn’t come at a substantial cost.
The last resort, according to SolBlaze, who runs a liquid staking pool and is active in developer communities, is to coordinate a restart effort, which will take the chain entirely offline. When Solana will be entirely operational is still to be determined.
The high-performance blockchain called Solana is designed to revive the Ethereum network. It seeks to offer low costs and quick transaction times. Users’ worries about its stability and functionality have increased as a result of its most recent crises.
