Solana invites criticism and support following six-hour outage. Yesterday, a nearly six-hour network shutdown from Solana, a layer-one blockchain known for its high throughput, invited derision and encouragement from traders and developers across the smart contract region.
“At approximately 1:46pm UTC on December 4th, 2020, the Solana Mainnet Beta cluster stopped producing blocks at slot 53,180,900, which prevented any new transactions from being confirmed,” a live update blog post from Solana reported.
The outage lasted roughly five and a half hours before over 200 Solana network validators, representing over 80% of the stake weight of the network, successfully initiated network restart instructions and began producing blocks again.
The Solana team said “We would like to thank the passionate and diligent global network of validators who identified this issue and coordinated to restart the network,”
A post-mortem on the network interruption is forthcoming. Solana’s founder and CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko, has said that he embraces competition between layer-one protocols, and that it can help to breed “excellence.” Solana’s SOL token is up over 5% to $1.97 on a 24-hour basis, following a dip yesterday where the token bottomed at $1.85.
Critics in the Ethereum community, as well as other layer-one rivals, were able to get into Solana’s problems on Twitter yesterday. One analyst noted that Serum trades, the Solana-Native Decentralized Exchange Created by Centralized FTX Exchange, had processed few BTC trades in the hours following the disruption, suggesting that there was little demand for services beyond trading ‘bots:’
