The price of SOL fell more than 3% following a “massive outage” on the Solana network.
Solana prices fell as low as $93.36 before recovering to current levels of $93.70, down 4.1% on the day and more than 11% for the week, according to CoinGecko data.
The Solana Network’s status page shows a “massive outage” of the mainnet beta cluster, with a notification that “Engineers across the ecosystem are investigating the mainnet beta outage” as of 10:22 AM UTC.
According to the Solana Status Twitter account, which provides network status updates, engineers have released a new validation software update, version v1.17.20, which fixes “an issue that resulted in a cluster outage.”
Engineers across the ecosystem are preparing a new release of validator software with patches to fix the issues that caused the cluster outage. Validator operators must be prepared for network upgrades and restarts.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) February 6, 2024
This is not the first time the Solana network has been shut down, but it is the first time in a long time. In February 2023, the network was down for nearly 20 hours. This comes just months after Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said that the upcoming Firedancer client proposed a “long-term solution” to solve this problem.
An early version of the validator client called “Frankendancer” was released on testnet in November. Jump Crypto, which has been developing a new validator client, said it aims to move Frankendancer to the Solana mainnet by the summer and have Firedancer on the mainnet “as a fully independent validator by the end of 2024.”
Broadly speaking, some of Solana’s network outages were caused by issues with the software that validators use to run their nodes. The goal of building Firedancer to make the network more resilient is to ensure that validators have backup software they can use in case other software has issues.
But it wasn’t all bad news for Solana. Last week saw a surge in network activity and token trading on the Solana decentralized exchange briefly reversed trading on the Ethereum DEX amid anticipation of the upcoming Jupiter airdrop.
Edited by Stacey Elliott.
