Solana Outage

According to the official blog post, At approximately 05:46:16 UTC 2023-02-25, Solana Mainnet Beta suffered a significant performance degradation, eventually leading the validator community to opt for a restart of the network, This was the first Solana outage of 2023 which lasted for 19 hours and 20 minutes, Meaning transactions weren't processing on the network as they were supposed to. The validators tried to restart the network twice over the weekend after the on-chain activity froze. At one time, Solana was processing only 93 TPS. Following the performance degradation, the validator community eventually had to opt for a synchronized chain restart of the network. At approximately Feb 26, 2023 - 01:28 UTC Solana Mainnet Beta was successfully restarted and the network resumed processing user transactions.

The decision to restart the network was suggested by the engineers debugging the issues. Following this, the validator community jointly decided to downgrade to the previous stable release, v1.13.6. Simultaneously, 1.14 was rolled out to reduce restart risk.

Last year, Solana endured 14 outages, both with small and large downtimes. Infuriated community members pointed out that the continued outages could be due to a massive design flaw in the network.

They further criticized the network, saying that out of the 4k TPS that Solana boasts, only 10% are “actual” transactions while adding that the majority of the volume is made up of validators’ messages, which ultimately bogs down the system.

In case of an outage, the communication between the validators ceases, during which they turn to Discord to chalk out a plan. However, two-thirds of validators must agree on a solution to get back up, and some of them could be offline or unaware of the outage.

Solana’s tech slowdowns aren’t new. Last year, the team behind its development even laid out ways to mitigate such incidents. More recently, the developers implemented a new feature called “Priority fees” to enable users to pay extra to avoid congestion.

What is Solana?

Solana is a high-performance blockchain platform designed to support decentralized applications (dApps) and cryptocurrency transactions at scale. It was created in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko and his team, and it aims to solve some of the scalability issues faced by other blockchain platforms like Ethereum.

Solana uses a unique consensus mechanism called Proof of History (PoH) in combination with Proof of Stake (PoS) to achieve high throughput and low latency. PoH is a decentralized clock that allows nodes on the network to agree on the order of events without the need for expensive computation, while PoS allows token holders to participate in the consensus process and earn rewards for validating transactions.

With its high throughput and low transaction fees, Solana is well-suited for applications that require fast and frequent transactions, such as decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). As a result, it has gained popularity among developers and users alike, and its native token, SOL, has become one of the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

As the Solana network experiences another outage on February 25, 2023 - its first outage of the year - we have an opportunity to gain insights into the network's response to this issue. In this analysis, we will compare network activity from 2 weeks before the outage to 2 weeks after it occurred. The time frame of this analysis is separated into 3 parts:

• Before Outage (Green 🟩 in Charts): This refers to the period of time leading up to the Solana network outage on February 25, 2023.
• Outage Day (Red 🟥 in Charts): This refers specifically to the day that the Solana network outage occurred, which in this case is February 25, 2023.
• After Outage (Brown 🟫 in Charts): This refers to the period of time following the Solana network outage on February 25, 2023.

Actually, We are going to analyze the impact of this outage on the following:

• $SOL Token Price
• Overall Solana Chain Activity
• Swapping Activity
• Staking and Liquidity Providing Actions
• Governance Voting
• NFT Minting and Trading
• Tokens' Transfer
• Tokens' Bridging
• Blocks' Performance

Solana plans to improve its blockchain

After a network-wide slowdown left users frantic, Solana released plans to improve its latest network upgrade.

on Feb. 28, Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder and CEO of Solana Labs, released another statement about how the ecosystem plans to improve its recent network upgrades. The major focus of the plan is on stability as the network continues its transition.

The statement laid out a six-step plan for engineers to help streamline the process and revealed that an adversarial team had been formed, which comprises one-third of the Solana engineering team.

This team was formed to build additional hooks and instrumentation into the validator code and target exploits throughout the underlying protocols.

Additionally, it laid out ways to focus on creating network-wide stability. This includes a second validator client built by Jump Crypto’s firedancer team and Mango DAO developers building new tooling and implementing local fee markets — among other efforts.

Yakovenko’s recent statement also mentioned that an investigation of what happened in the initial outage is still being conducted, with the community to be informed when information is available.

On Feb. 28, he clarified that on-chain voting was not the cause of the slowdown.

The community response to the outage was one of frenzy, with some users calling the system a “transaction killer.” However, the response to Yakovenko’s improvement roadmap was mixed, with some users saying the news was “great to hear,” while others still questioned Solana’s integrity.

The Solana ecosystem call is planned for March 2, 2023, in which it intends to discuss the state of the ecosystem, among other issues.

Later in the month, on March 27, Helium Network’s communications protocol plans to migrate to the Solana blockchain to deploy oracles.

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