Solana (SOL) suddenly experienced severe problems yesterday. It blockchain network was heavily overloaded and that caused the network to process as many as 400,000 transactions per second (TPS). Bitcoin (BTC), in contrast, can only handle about 7 TPS.
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
However, it also caused the memory to fill up, that nodes (computers) disconnected from the network, which split the blockchain and administrators could no longer keep Solana stable. In the end, the Solana network was down for more than 16 hours.
Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, explains that bots during a initial DEX offering (IDO) on Raydium had overloaded the network. Solana developers were already working on a priority system for transactions to avoid these kinds of problems, but it was not ready yet.
Bots during a raydium ido are flooding the network at 300k txs per second. The queues that forwards txs to block producers grew in size to a point that caused excessive forking. The fix to prioritize messages in this queue was already in the works but wasn’t out yet.
— Anatoly Yakovenko (@aeyakovenko) September 14, 2021
Then the “validator community” decided to restart the entire Solana network. Those are the people who verify the transactions in a proof of stake (PoS) protocol as Solana and are similar to bitcoin miners.
The reboot took place this morning and was successfully performed and immediately includes an upgrade for the mainnet. Other applications on the network will soon follow, reports the Solana Status Twitter account, which emphasizes that the network is still in beta.
The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25. Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 15, 2021
However, the incident caused the SOL price to fall further yesterday, although the price has been going since the all time high of $213.5 was in a downtrend. The price dropped to $145 last night, but then started to rise again. This morning, SOL is back at $165, although the resistance there seems to be a bit too large for the time being.
More network problems?
Curiously, this was not the only such occurrence in the past 24 hours. Arbitrum, a so-called layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum (ETH), was out for about 45 minutes. Arbitrum was also overloaded by an error in the code which has now been fixed. Daniel Goldman explains on Twitter what happened:
Was “Arbitrum Down” Today? Practically speaking, for most users, for ~45 minutes, yes.
But if I want to get nit-picky and pedantic (and you know I do) I could argue that it was not! 🧵
(1/x)https://t.co/LE0X8Tdajs— Daniel “Arbitrum has never gone down” Goldman (@DZack23) September 14, 2021
In addition, someone even tried to attack Ethereum, Marius van der Wijden reports. Fortunately, the attack was in vain:
Someone unsuccessfully tried to attack #ethereum today by publishing a long (~550) blocks which contained invalid pow’s. Only a small percentage of @nethermindeth nodes switched to this invalid chain. All other clients rejected the long sidechain as invalid
— MariusVanDerWijden (@vdWijden) September 14, 2021