Solana Experiences Major Network Outage

January 27, 2022 3:27 pm Comments

Solana has been described as one of the top competitors that could eventually surpass Ethereum one day by multiple blockchain analysts from different financial institutions.

However, the network recently suffered another network congestion issue which prevented users from from topping up loan collaterals.

As a result, some investors became worried which caused an additional selloff in the market.

This was not the second time the network had become congested as the blockchain network previously suffered a 30 hour congestion period that was caused by bots spamming the network over the weekend.

These multiple occurrences of network congestions have brought the issue to the spotlight as the community is concerned over Solana’s ability to scale and stay stable during periods of high volume.

CryptoPotato reports:

The latest Solana network outage happened on Friday and lasted for more than 48 hours, causing DeFi users who borrowed funds from lending platforms to suffer forced liquidation.

According to Solana’s team, Friday’s incident resulted from “excessive duplicate transactions” from bots, which caused the network to experience high levels of congestion.

The recent outage sparked criticism from industry experts and users.

While many questioned Solana’s reliability and status as a “Wall Street darling,” some think it is no longer part of the blockchain race for the future.

Despite the shortcomings, some analysts and investors are still not worried about the future of Solana.

Founder of the FTX exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried, tweeted that it is still superior to many other blockchains for multiple reasons such as being able to process more transactions than all the other major networks combined.

Still, it was clear that there was a lot of room for improvement in order to be able to increase the throughput of the system so that it can scale with the increased demand.

Reaction from the public and some Solana users were not positive unfortunately.

NFTevening shares:

“There were many failed attempts at depositing and repaying, which made it difficult for users to save their accounts from being liquidated,” the report further said.

“Liquidation and arbitrage bots began submitting a high volume of transactions in an effort to win liquidations and trades.”

The increased duplicate transactions also “drowned out legitimate user transactions.”

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

Author Mark Jeffrey, for instance, said he has no faith in Solana now. “This is like the sixth time this has happened in 3 months,” he tweeted. “I have zero faith in it now.  It is the new EOS.”

To fix the issue, Solana engineers released a new version 1.8.14 and decided to reimburse users who happened to be liquidated during the incident as a way to appease those who were directly affected.

Since the incidents were reported, SOL prices have crashed and has fallen from the fourth largest cryptocurrency last month  to the eight largest.

This could be a wakeup call for the Solana team to ensure that they are able to support additional transactions and enhance the overall stability of the network.

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