Solana Market Cap Hops XRP As Cryptos Crash 15-30% From Leveraged Liquidations. Photo: Official logo
The blockchain operating system for Solana, one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrencies of the year, is back up and running after crashing on Tuesday for 17 hours, due, the company said, to a surge in transactions that resulted in a “major outage.”
Solana indicated “All Systems Operational” as of about 2:15 a.m. EDT, Bloomberg reported.
The issue was connected to “resource exhaustion” in the network that caused the denial of service, according to a tweet from the Solana Status account at 10:26 a.m. on Tuesday. Third parties who validate transactions on the Solana blockchain elected to coordinate a restart of the network, the developer team tweeted later.
Solana is an open-source, public blockchain platform that achieves consensus using proof-of-stake. It’s known for its cheap, fast transactions that have given it a reputation as a disruptor of rival Ethereum or even an “Ethereum killer“. Offering peer-to-peer transactions with its SOL cryptocurrency, Solana claims to support 50,000 transactions per second.
By comparison, Bitcoin can support about five transactions per second and Ethereum, 25. Visa claims to support 24,000 transactions per second, but that’s disputed — it’s more like about 1,700 transactions per second, Ali Saberi wrote for The Lightning Network.
The No. 7 crypto by market cap, Solana has seen share prices as low as $59.75 in the past month and as high as a record $211.05 last week, according to Messario. The record high was reached despite a selloff in the broader cryptocurrency market. SOL shares were down after the network crash, trading at $162 as of this writing. The price of Solana is up more than 30,000 percent from its low of $0.50 cents in May 2020 with a market cap of about $48.662 billion.
Twitter users had a field day.
“solana down 14% after not working for half a day “cardano valued at $76 billion after not working ever,” tweeted Mike DAOdas @mdudas.
“Everything in crypto is an early stage experiment. Some earlier stage than others,” tweeted Ari Paul
@AriDavidPaul
In its tweet, Solana told its validators, who help secure the system, how they could help restart the network after the surge in activity, Business Insider reported. The company said ”intermittent instability” had disrupted some services after Solana’s transaction load peaked at 400,000 transactions per second.
“These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking,” Solana’s team tweeted. Forking, which happened after the transactions flooded the network, means the blockchain splits and the software of different miners, or validators, don’t align. A decision on which version of the blockchain to use is critical, Business Insider reported.
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