On September 14, Solana, a decentralized blockchain, faced a prolonged outage when its blockchain network remained unavailable for more than 17 hours, after weeks of spectacular gains during which the price of its coin was more than fivefold in value. 

The Solana Foundation released an initial post-mortem of the event of the incident by shedding additional light on the core reason for last week’s network outage.

During those agonizing 17 hours, the system failure held $11 billion in investor funds. SOL prices fell 5.06% during the outage, from $171.48 to $142.86.

According to the Foundation, “the cause of the network stall was a denial of service attack. At 12:00 UTC, Grape Protocol launched their IDO on Raydium, and bots generated transactions that flooded the network. These transactions created a memory overflow, which caused many validators to crash, forcing the network to slow down and eventually stall. The network went offline when the validator network could not agree on the current state of the blockchain, which prevented the network from confirming new blocks".

The outage was caused mostly by resource exhaustion because of transaction load reaching 400,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS).

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is a form of cyber-attack that prevents a legitimate user from gaining access to a computer system or other devices.

There were no funds lost during the 17-hour outage, and the network was back up and running in less than 24 hours. Its native token SOL has dropped over 15% in the last seven days after a tremendous surge of about 700% in the past 30 days. The SOL is currently trading 2% higher.

Solana, which launched in April 2020, is the world's fastest public blockchain platform and an excellent alternative for new developers of decentralized apps. It claims to support 50,000 transactions per second and can facilitate peer-to-peer transactions with its native token.

Pavan A

CBW - External Analyst

INDIA