Following the ‘Forking’ Event, the Solana Network Crashes and On-Chain Trade Slows

Some validators are reverting to older versions of their software in an effort to restore activity.

Infrastructure managers on the Solana network hurried to restore the blockchain’s functionality early on Saturday after a technical glitch impeded users’ ability to trade cryptocurrencies, transfer assets, or conduct any other transaction on-chain.

According to Solana’s Discord channel, the blockchain began “forking” (generating contradictory copies of its transaction history) at about 00:53 New York time. Soon afterwards, the Memory of validators started to increase, but the transaction throughput of the chain dropped.

These technical issues essentially froze the vast majority of on-chain transactions on the Solana network. According to the statistics site Solana Explorer, around 02:00 the network was processing about 93 transactions per second (TPS), a pace much lower than the rate of almost 5000 TPS 15 minutes earlier.

It was a situation reminiscent of the chain’s rough tech issues in 2022 when a series of halts and slowdowns led Solana to implement new incoming traffic management procedures. Saturday’s event had no clear cause, although validator operators and network engineers suspected a problem in the newly deployed version of the Solana code.

Several validators started downgrading to the prior version in hopes of recovering Solana’s throughput, according to SolBlaze, a liquid staking pool operator and active participant in development circles. Subsequently, Solana workers also started to advocate for the demotion.

In an effort to restore Solana’s operations, the vast majority of validators reverted back to the previous software within hours. Yet it did nothing to remedy the unidentified issue that was hindering performance. The work then shifted to a more severe solution, which consisted of resetting the chain prior to the fork.

Some validators are reverting to older versions of their software in an effort to restore activity. Infrastructure managers on the Solana network hurried to restore the blockchain’s functionality early on Saturday after a technical glitch impeded users’ ability to trade cryptocurrencies, transfer assets, or conduct any other transaction on-chain.

According to Solana’s Discord channel, the blockchain began “forking” at about 00:53 New York time. Soon afterwards, the Memory of validators started to increase, but the transaction throughput of the chain plummeted.

These technical issues essentially froze the vast majority of on-chain transactions on the Solana network. According to the statistics site Solana Explorer, around 02:00 the network was processing about 93 transactions per second (TPS), a pace much lower than the rate of almost 5000 TPS 15 minutes earlier.

It was a situation reminiscent of the chain’s rough tech issues in 2022, when a series of halts and slowdowns led Solana to implement new incoming traffic management procedures. Saturday’s event had no clear cause, although validator operators and network engineers suspected a problem in the newly deployed version of the Solana code.

Several validators started downgrading to the prior version in hopes of recovering Solana’s throughput, according to SolBlaze, a liquid staking pool operator and active participant in development circles. Subsequently, Solana workers also started to advocate for the demotion.

In an effort to restore Solana’s operations, the vast majority of validators reverted back to the previous software within hours. Yet it did nothing to remedy the unidentified issue that was hindering performance. The work then shifted to a more severe solution, which consisted of resetting the chain prior to the fork.

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