Huge transaction traffic knocks out Solana network for 7 hours
The Solana network was out for a 7-hour period on Saturday April 30. A rush of bots trying to mint NFTs caused the outage which started at 8 pm UTC on Saturday, and lasted into the early hours of Sunday. According to Solana developers and engineers the traffic attained an all-time high of 4 million transactions per second. Further, obliterating all other previous highs in terms of transactions on the blockchain per second significantly.
Solana Network on the path to recovery
As at this morning, the Solana network’s validators completed a cluster restart to get the blockchain running again. As a result of the restart, the Solana blockchain was operating slowly in the morning. Which is the first sign of recovery because it takes a while for every node to come back online.
Solana has experienced a rise up the crypto ranks for some time now. The network’s steady growth catapulted it to the top 10 blockchains in terms of market cap. Additionally, the blockchain also has the second-highest NFT volume, second to only the Ethereum blockchain.
This is not the first time the Solana network is facing server issues. The previous server outage has faced server issue was in January and that case lasted for 18 hours. The cause of both outages in the blockchain so far has been a massive influx of NFT bots. Network outages poses a problem for Solana NFT traders because it makes buying and selling almost impossible for them.
Another major draw-back of outages like this is its impact on the price of Solana’s native token – SOL. The token fell 7.4% overnight in the recent outage due to the drop in trading activities. Following the recent restoration Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko hailed the network’s validators for having it back up quickly.
Overtaking Ethereum, a tall dream?
Solana’s has grown tremendously, but the recent outage reiterates why overtaking Ethereum still remains a tall dream. The network will likely fail to overtake Ethereum in terms of NFT scope and volume. And Ethereum will continue to dominate because events like this erodes the users’ trust in the network. Finally, Solana has been doing very well recently and is experiencing the most volume they’ve had ever due to the success of NFT projects on the network. This is a positive fact to look forward to, following the recent blockchain outage.