Yesterday the crypto news reported that the Solana (SOL) network was experiencing problems after validators started putting conflicting transactions on the blockchain yesterday morning. The Solana Foundation, among others, recommended validators after this to move to older software as an interim solution. This seems to work.
Solana network is working again
The Solana Foundation acknowledged the problem and stated that developers are looking into exactly what the problem is. The throughput of transactions fell dramatically yesterday due to the software problems. The network regularly achieved only a few hundred and sometimes even tens of transactions per second (TPS), a significant decline compared to the 4,000 to 5,000 it otherwise achieves.
Solana Status writes on Twitter that the validators have been working on a coordinated restart. Around 2 o’clock this morning Dutch time, this restart was successful, and at the time of writing it seems to work indeed. Solana’s own explorer also shows that the target speed of more than 4,000 TPS in general is taken again.
The network can still be a bit slow here and there, but that will slowly decrease once all validators have their software downgraded. It took developers two attempts to restart the network.
Approximately 15 minutes ago the Solana community successfully resumed the cluster – engineers will continue to monitor network performance as network operators are restored.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) February 26, 2023
The downgrade will not be a permanent solution, presumably developers are already working on a new version. In any case, transactions that have been successfully processed in the past are still on the blockchain.
Lots of changes at Solana
There’s a lot going on at Solana. For example, the network Helium (HNT) recently switched to Solana because it felt it was better for the development of Helium. Solana is very fast, which is very important for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) market that Helium focuses on.
Also, Solana is now home to a brand new memecoin called Bonk (ticker: BONK). The name of this token is based on the meme where the Shiba Inu dog we also know from Dogecoin (DOGE) hits another with a bat. The sound this makes is described as ‘bonk’. At the same time, two of the most popular Non-Fungible Token (NFT) projects moving away from Solana.