Solana Blockchain Suffers Intermittent Stability

Solana, one of the biggest DeFi chains by value locked, suffered network outages Tuesday. The Solana team first alerted users to the issue on Twitter at 8:38 AM New York time, saying the network had been “experiencing intermittent instability” for the prior 45 minutes.

Some nodes on the smart contracts chain went offline after the network had problems handling a higher-than-usual load, according to a spokeswoman for the team.

“Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS,” said a statement emailed via Diana Bost of Hokku PR. “These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and the lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.

“This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline. Engineers across the ecosystem attempted to stabilize the network, but were unsuccessful.”

Chain Restart

Solana validators decided to coordinate a restart of the chain.

At 5:00 AM the price of SOL was $170.77, according to CoinMarketCap, but it fell to as low as $151.6 at 2:39 PM, before recovering somewhat. It’s trading at $152.37 as of late afternoon Tuesday.

The drop in transactions can be seen on this graph from the Solana block explorer: