Solana (SOL-USD) is one of the blockchain industry’s leading layer-1 networks. It has become a major player in the non-fungible token (NFT) trend, helping to steal some of Ethereum’s (ETH-USD) dominance over the space. However, the network is known for its frequent outages. While the platform has already experienced a multitude of these outages this year, this past weekend’s Solana outage is one of the worst in recent memory and drove significant SOL losses.
High performance is Solana’s calling card; in fact, the network’s scalability is one of the components primarily driving Solana’s success. A proof-of-stake network, Solana is not plagued by the slow throughput of proof-of-work networks like Ethereum. Developers say the network is capable of handling 710,000 transactions per minute, or nearly 12,000 transactions per second. This is vastly larger than the few dozen transactions Ethereum can handle per second. Currently, the network is handling between 1,000 and 3,000 transactions, according to consumer demand.
However, Solana has picked up a reputation since its launch in 2019 for frequent outages. Indeed, while it seems as though the network is advertised as one of the highest-scaling options for dapp users, it has shown a tendency to shut down with rushes of traffic. This weekend, that uglier side of the network is showing through once again.
Solana Outage Holds Down Network for Seven Hours, Tanks SOL Prices
The most recent Solana outage occurred between Saturday and Sunday. It saw the network shut down for a whopping seven hours. The event barred users from trading across the Solana network entirely while nodes went to work trying to restore activity.
According to the network, an army of bots caused the outage, flocking to an NFT-minting platform called Candy Machine. The massive rush of artificial traffic led to a bottlenecking of transactions on the network. Of course, being bots, most of the traffic consists of invalid transactions. As a result of the fiasco, network operations didn’t resume until early Sunday morning.
This event makes for Solana’s seventh outage in 2022. The seven-hour turmoil was one of Solana’s longer outages since September’s catastrophic network failure that suspended operations for nearly a full day. Naturally, the Solana outage is drawing criticism from users. It is worth noting, however, that Solana isn’t the only network to suffer high transaction volume woes this past weekend. Ethereum saw gas fees on transactions rise by thousands of dollars in the wake of Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse land auction.
On the date of publication, Brenden Rearick did not hold (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.
