Solana Outage Likely Caused by Bots Pursuing an Initial DEX Offering

At 2:01 AM New York time Wednesday morning, the Solana blockchain went live once again, according to @SolanaStatus.

“The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25,” the platform reported. “Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.”

The Solana team has not released a technical post-mortem on the outage but some additional details have emerged. For example, founder Anatoly Yakovenko tweeted that a bot network chasing an initial DEX offering (IDO) was an issue in the outage. He did not identify the IDO, but he did say it was on Raydium, an automated market maker.

No Bad Debt

The most likely offering seems to be that of GRAPE, a social networking protocol. Its IDO was set to start at 8:00 AM ET Tuesday. The outage was reported very shortly thereafter.

So far, there doesn’tt appear to have been widespread consequences for decentralized finance users on Solana.

SolFarm, a yield aggregator on Solana whose pools touch many DeFi projects across the network, tweeted, “No bad debt has been found and no liquidation has been processed.”

The price for Solana’s coin, SOL, has not recovered to the $170.77 price it was at prior to the outage, according to CoinMarketCap. It has clawed back some losses from the low of $151.60. It’s now trading at $159.90 as of late morning Wednesday.

DefiLlama shows a loss in total value locked on the network has dropped from $12.2 to $10.9B, but that’s a fall basically in line with the drop in SOL price.