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It’s a difficult day for Solana as the smart contracts blockchain encountered “excessive load and memory consumption” which caused repeated network forks and nodes going offline, during a significant event starting on Sep 14 and still continuing, after bots spammed the network with high number of transactions, bringing the network down. Currently, the blockchain has been down for over 7 hours and the elected validator committee is planning to restart the chain, an event likely to be a full blown chain rollback.
1/ Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021
A restart of the Solana blockchain means that validators will now try to restore and fix the blockchain, by reverting to an earlier copy of the blockchain, an action which might erase some tx records from the ledger. The extent of the damage can’t be ascertained at this point. Solana main selling point is it’s extremely high transactions per second (TPS) count, reported to be 400,000 tx / sec – ensuring rapid settlement and fluid operation. However, questions have been raised regarding the platform’s decentralization caused by the near-impossible requirements to run a validator for average users, therefore limiting the ability of users to verify activity by themselves.
3/ The validator community elected to coordinate a restart of the network – the community is preparing a new release, and instructions will be posted in Discord. https://t.co/gRJJRqEMPn
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021
Solana is currently down and not functional. The blockchain isn’t producing new blocks nor producing transactions and the user funds on the network are frozen, until it comes back offline. It’s worrisome because the blockchain secures billions of dollars in value and is home to several important DeFi DApps. The blockchain explorer for Solana Bitquery shows that the last block was mined on 14/09/2021 11:58 at block height 96538248.
Solana native token SOL hasn’t seen any crash though, part of it might be related to the user’s ability to access the tokens in the first place, since the tokens tradable at the point are those on the centralized exchanges. SOL price is down 7.2% and is changing hands currently at $153.96. The patch fix is likely to be rolled out soon and the network slated to come back online, after the proposed restart, which will have long term effects on the chain’s immutability, depending on the value of the txs that are likely to be reversed.
