Solana made headlines on Tuesday after the blockchain suffered downtime around 10:22 GMT, with the incident lasting five hours before normalcy was restored. Reports indicate that the downtime demanded a network upgrade and a reboot of the cluster by validator operators.
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Solana blockchain was compelled to pause all block productions on February 6 after a network outage. The incident contributed to the $2.07 million long positions that were liquidated in the last 24 hours. About $10 million in open interest also went down the drain, dropping from $1.36 billion to $1.35 billion between February 5 and 6.
SOL Liquidations
An incident report from the Solana blockchain highlighted, “Block production on Solana mainnet beta resumed at 14:57 UTC (9:47 a.m. ET), following a successful upgrade to v1.17.20 and a restart of the cluster by validator operators. Engineers will continue to monitor performance as network operations are restored.”
VanEck’s Head of Research, Mathew Sigel, attributed the outage to a failure in the “Berkeley Packet Filter” mechanism to deploy upgrades and execute programs on Solana.
Notably, the incident marked the eleventh outage since 2022, with a chronicle of downtimes, forks and challenges on the Solana blockchain showing that the extreme downtime collectively lasted multiple days.
It remains anybody’s guess on how this could weigh in on the Solana versus Ethereum rivalry, with the longstanding debate over their individual efficiency, development and scalability. While Solana's energy consumption has long been an advantage over Ethereum's higher energy usage, Ethereum’s edge comes on the back of its robust developer community.
The two blockchains are often pitted against each other, owing to the fact that they both rely on proof-of-stake (PoS) methods, which are considered more environmentally efficient.
At the time of writing, Solana price is trading for $95.33, registering a 0.16% drop in 24 hours. Trading volume is down 5%, pointing to shifting interest away from SOL.
SOL/USDT 1-day chart