Early Wednesday evening, the blockchain was shut down due to a “bug” in the production of blocks by validators. Its cryptocurrency has lost more than 12% since.
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Blockchain
The Solana blockchain is in trouble again. Early Wednesday evening, the blockchain was shut down due to a “bug” in the production of blocks by validators. For four long hours, no transaction could be completed and his cryptocurrency, the solana, also fell.
This cryptocurrency is in the top 10 of the largest cryptocurrencies in terms of capitalization according to data from Coinmarketcap, displaying 13 billion in capitalization. Faced with the shutdown of the blockchain, it has fallen 12% since Wednesday, when its price had reached its highest point of the day in the early afternoon, at 45.50 dollars, before falling until at 38.42 dollars at seven o’clock in the morning.
At the time of writing this paper, the price of the cryptocurrency is close to 39 dollars. These levels are well below what this cryptocurrency, launched in 2020, has experienced and which had reached its highest level at 259 dollars in mid-June.
What happened ? On Wednesday, the Solana blockchain announced on its Twitter account that its block production had been halted. As a reminder, a bit like a digital book, the blockchain (or chain of blocks) brings together all the blocks (transactions) of a network, from the oldest to the most recent. The two best-known blockchains are Bitcoin (and its own cryptocurrency bitcoin) and Ethereum (and its own cryptocurrency ether).
According to blockchain founder Anatoly Yakovenko, it was a bug in the blockchain’s “durable nonce function”, which caused part of the network to “consider the block to be invalid, resulting in the fact that “no bloc” could be formed.
What is a blockchain durable nonce? Elements of answers can be found on the technical site of Solana. “A classic transaction includes a blockhash that expires 2 minutes after being sent. In some cases, it may be necessary to hold a transaction for a certain period of time before being sent. is used”, explains the blockchain Solana.
Fixing this issue required validators to disable this feature and reboot the entire network to get the durable nonces back up and running.
Already 8 outages on the Solana network
This is not the first time the Solana blockchain has suffered an outage, with this becoming the 8th outage in its network.
In early May, due to an influx of bots on its blockchain, it broke down for 7 hours. Similarly, in September, the network was interrupted for nearly 6 p.m. for failing to manage a record number of transactions sent to one of its protocols for the launch of a new token.
How to explain these repeated breakdowns? One element of the answer may be found in the fact that Solana is still a recent blockchain, since it was launched in 2020. The latter wishes in particular to set itself up as a competitor to the Ethereum blockchain, in particular by offering many services in decentralized finance (DeFi).
According to platform data Defiflame, the total value locked (TVL) of the Solana blockchain also took a hit yesterday, falling from $4.35 billion to $4.14 billion, thus losing almost 5%. Last December, its TVL reached its highest level, at 15 billion. Since this record high, the amount of its TVL has plummeted.
As a reminder, in decentralized finance, TVL corresponds to funds blocked in various protocols. It is an indicator of the economic health of a DeFi protocol that shows the interest of individuals and investors.