Solana blockchain developers have announced that the network has started to hard fork after reaching its maximum transactions per second (TPS) on Tuesday.
Solana will be restarted, developers reported. blockchain hours after reporting that the network was experiencing “intermittent instability.” Yesterday, the Solana network came to a complete halt at 11:58 am UTC, the time at which its shutdown occurred. last block, at the time of writing this article.
As reported by the developers via Twitter, resource exhaustion on the Solana network was causing a denial of service. The network's developers and software engineers quickly began working on a solution, but were unsuccessful. Therefore, Solana validators agreed to restart the network.
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, 2021See AlsoKrypto kaufen, verkaufen und tauschen - ultraschnellWhat Is Solana? How Does It Work? – ScissormanWhat Is Solana? Is It A Good Investment? | Mudrex Learn
Solana experienced a huge spike in the number of transactions on the network, eventually reaching its peak of 400.000 transactions per second (TPS), the developers reported. These transactions flooded Solana's transaction processing queue, and due to a lack of prioritization and crashing, the network began to fork. In turn, the fork caused excessive memory consumption, causing some of the nodes to go offline.
Solana users reported as of midday yesterday that transactions on the network were experiencing long delays in execution. Also, developers of services built on this blockchain network, such as Phantom, notified who were having trouble connecting.
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Bots paralyzed Solana
According to the researcher Georgios Konstantopoulos, the resource depletion problems in Solana were Caused by bots, which began sending large amounts of spam transactions to the network, causing the mainnet to come to a standstill. Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, also noted that bots were saturating the network, sending transaction volumes of up to 300.000 TPS. The bot transactions are associated with the launch of the Initial DEX Offering (IDO) of Raydium, a decentralized finance protocol (DeFi) built on this network.
Bots during a raydium gone 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
The rise and development of DeFi in the last year encouraged developers to focus on the creation of new blockchains, highly scalable alternatives to Ethereum.
Yakovenko made a called to the Solana validator community to join the project “its beta time” via Discord. The Solana Foundation also reported that it is through Discord that information will be provided about the new version that the developers are preparing and the instructions that the network validators must follow.
Controversies of centralization
The news of the Solana network restart did not sit well with many members of the crypto community, who have begun to criticize and speculate about the degree of centralization within a network that is supposed to be decentralized.
On the other hand, network users complain about not being able to execute their transactions and interact with the existing protocols in Solana, as well as not having access to their NFTs. Well-known people in the crypto industry, such as Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX, had defended Solana's scalability over Ethereum's. Last year, Bankman-Fried said that Ethereum was unable to handle the rapid growth of DeFi and its transaction volume, and that not even Ethereum 2.0 could do it; while Solana did have the capacity, being able to process thousands of transactions per second.
Despite criticism, Yakovenko manifested that it was better to see and solve the problem now, rather than when the network had 1.000 billion users.
Price of SOL
SOL, the native token of the Solana network, appears not to have been significantly affected by the news.
At the time of writing this article, the price of SOL remains close to the 158 dollars per unit. The cryptocurrency shows a drop in value of 8% in the last 7 days, although it maintains an impressive growth in the last month of 200%. With a market capitalization of 46.780 billion dollars, SOL continues to be the seventh most important cryptocurrency in the entire industry.
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