Solana Shuts Down for the Seventh Time This Year

Over the weekend, Solana experienced its seventh shutdown in 2022. The blockchain recorded six shut downs in January, and this past weekend marks number seven. A tweet from user @YaelOss points out that the shutdown follows a remark from Solana’s co-founder about how BTC should have changed its consensus protocol a long time ago. The shutdown was ironically caused by the mainnet losing consensus protocol for 7 hours.

Due to high traffic volume, Solana ended up shutting down and needing a complete restart, which is rare and often avoided in the cryptocurrency space. After the restart this past Sunday, transactions proceeded as usual. Tweets about the outage flooded the social media platform, heightening the reservations users have about the claimed decentralized platform.

Solana experienced a surge in transactions hitting a high of 4 million transactions per second resulting in more than 100 gigabytes of data being generated per second. This activity overwhelmed the mainnet and temporarily made transactions nearly impossible. The sudden increase in transactions was a direct result of bots accessing the Solana Candy Machine used for generating NFTs on the network.

To resolve this issue in the future, a penalty fee will be introduced in order to minimize the likelihood of bots shutting down the platform again. The company behind Candy Machine is also looking into other ways to prevent an influx of bots.

The outage did impact Solana's market price temporarily which decreased in value by 10%. However, the price has now adjusted and recovered. Additionally, the platform is receiving a lot of criticism about its effectiveness in handling transactions and avoiding these shutdowns to begin with. It is important to note that while the platform has seen a number of issues overwhelm the network, each resulted from a different cause. No common connection between the various incidents were made at this time.

Many are waiting to see what Solana will do to prevent further outages from happening and how they will be communicated to users and the public.