Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at Vaneck, revealed that there is speculation around the cause of the latest Solana outage, which stopped its blockchain by five hours. Sigel explained that the bug that created this service interruption was related to the Berkley Packet Filter (BPF) and that it might have been manually triggered.
Solana Might Have Been Manually Stopped, Vaneck Exec Speculates
Solana, one of the top 5 cryptocurrency projects, might have been stopped manually by unknown actors. Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at Vaneck, explained that this bug might have been manually triggered by someone, given that it is related to a recent upgrade (0093) that implemented a change to block metadata from being loaded into the Berkley Packet Filter (BPF).
This bug affected the BPF, which according to Sigel, controls the deployment, upgrades, and execution of programs on top of the Solana blockchain. This caused the blockchain to stop producing blocks for approximately five hours and SOL to lose 3% until a fix was proposed, tested, and implemented, and the situation was controlled.
About the possible recurrence of a similar event in the future, Siegel stated:
This is a result of the experimental and constantly evolving nature of Solana. We believe a fix to this issue was already in the works.
Sigel believes that the event might affect the speed of the changes produced in Solana, as future updates and improvements will have to be debated more thoroughly before their actual implementation.
Nonetheless, this is all speculation, as an official statement about what caused the outage has not been issued by Solana engineers, who declared that a root cause report would be released once complete.
Previously, the Solana blockchain handled an increased load without going down during the Jupiter token airdrop, which distributed $700 million in JUP tokens to close to a million wallets.
What do you think about the possibility of manually introducing a bug to stop the Solana blockchain? Tell us in the comments section below.