Solana crashes worldwide due to a bug

New trouble for the Solana blockchain, which crashed for four hours worldwide yesterday due to a bug in the system.

A bug in the network causes Solana to crash for hours

There is no end to the troubles for Solana, the blockchain specializing in DeFi and NFT projects, which for months has been suffering some system problems that slow down its use and affect its efficiency. SOL has lost more than 12% in a single day due to this new problem.

BREAKING: #Solana network has been halted globally.

— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) June 1, 2022

It has not even been a month since the last crash that affected Solana, causing an interruption to blockchain services for over seven hours on 1 May. 

On that occasion, it was an attack by bots, which targeted the Candy machine, an NFT minting tool on the blockchain. Not even a month later, this new bug casts serious doubts on the efficiency of what is currently the fifth blockchain for TVL.

The bug this time was only fixed after a few hours, according to the company’s website, which reported that the system was shut down at 1 PM (CET) and only restarted by validators at 5 PM (CET).

What happened to the Solana blockchain this time?

According to information from Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and other developers, the problem was due to a bug with the blockchain’s durable nonce feature. 

Yakovenko tweeted that the problem:

“caused part of the network to consider the block is invalid, and that no consensus could be formed”.

tldr:
Durable nonce instruction caused part of the network to consider the block is invalid, no consensus could be formed. Network is restating with durable nonce feature disabled. Fix for durable nonces will be out asap. https://t.co/5gZnpCp36N

— toly 🇺🇸 (@aeyakovenko) June 1, 2022

Only by disabling this function by the validators was it possible to restart the network. Yakovenko also informed that this problem will soon be corrected to avoid such issues in the future.

Solana Lab’s head of communications, Austin Federa, said that durable nonce represented “an incredibly small percentage” of the transactions made on the Solana blockchain.

 Federa said:

“This was probably a bug that existed for a while but never really became an issue because it isn’t something that most people use”.

These issues are also behind the big drop of SOL from its highs at over $200 to below $40 in a few months. Solana was mentioned by many experts at the beginning of the year as one of Ethereum’s most dangerous rivals precisely because of the promising NFT market. Now, however, it seems that other blockchains such as Cardano or Avalanche are proving to be more reliable.