Bug Causes Solana Blockchain to Go Offline for Four Hours

Yesterday, the Solana blockchain platform was inaccessible for more than four hours owing to a problem that halted the generation of new blockchains. Shortly before 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the problem was first reported on the official Solana Status website and Twitter account. Validators brought the network back up by performing a restart just before 5 p.m. ET.

The problem was caused by a fault in the blockchain’s durable nonce function, as stated by the information provided by Anatoly Yakovenko, one of the co-founders of Solana, as well as other developers on Twitter. According to a tweet by Yakovenko, the problem “caused part of the network to assume the block is invalid,” and as a consequence, “no consensus could be reached.”

Validators collaborated to restart the Solana network without the durable nonce function, and Yakovenko stated that the problem would be rectified in a future release. Validators also worked together to deactivate the feature. According to the information provided on the Solana Status website, the downtime for the network totaled 4 hours and 10 minutes. As this article is being written, there are still some Solana RPC nodes coming back up.

An emerging rival to Ethereum, Solana has established itself as a popular platform for non-fungible token (NFT) collectibles, decentralized applications (dapps), and games, as well as decentralized financial services (DeFi).

The value of the SOL cryptocurrency, which is used by the network, skyrocketed last autumn but has since leveled down along with the majority of the rest of the cryptocurrency market in recent months. According to statistics provided by CoinMarketCap, the price of Solana has decreased by 11 percent over the previous 24 hours to just around $40. This represents a decrease of 84 percent from its all-time high of $260 reached in November of last year.

Over the course of the last several months, Solana has been plagued by not one but two high-profile bouts of downtime. In September of 2017, the network was inaccessible for close to 18 hours as a result of an excessive number of transactions being submitted to a DeFi protocol in preparation for the introduction of a new token. A postmortem report compiled by Solana Labs referred to the incident as a “denial of service attack.”

On April 30, the network broke when NFT minting bots—automated programs aiming to manipulate the rollout of a new NFT venture – swamped Solana with a whopping 6 million transactions every second. The developers of Solana’s NFT protocol, Metaplex, have included a penalty known as a “bot fee” in an effort to circumvent future occurrences of the aforementioned problem.