Hetzner blocks access to 1,000 Solana crypto validators

Hetzner, a cloud and hosting company, has blocked 1,000 Solana validators, causing more than 20% of the staking of the crypto SOL to become delinquent. The reason would be the company’s willingness to stop supporting this kind of activity in the crypto sector.

What happened to Solana’s blockchain

Delinquency occurs when a validator that has been assigned a certain amount in staking goes offline. At this point, by going offline, validators and the delegator no longer earn rewards.

More than 1,000 Solana validators have thus gone offline, causing more than one-fifth of the value in staking that protects the network to become delinquent. 

Solana’s blockchain appears to have been unaffected, despite 22% of the network’s security grade being offline. Solana’s status page shows no problems at the time of reporting, although there have been numerous disruptions to the network in the past.

Solana’s problems

In the past few months, the Solana blockchain has had several problems and has gone offline several times.

For example, on 30 September it experienced a down period last year, and actually, during 2022 there were already three times that the network had malfunctioned. Naturally, the crypto SOL has also been affected.

Solana’s blockchain performance and Hetzner’s involvement

According to a recently published report by RockawayX, Solana’s blockchain delinquency is at 22%, the highest score since last May. 

According to an earlier report, Hetzner was already considering banning operators from managing nodes. Indeed, the company’s terms of service state that cryptocurrency activity would be prohibited. 

Many Ethereum node operators relied on Hetzener until recently, hosting about 16% of all Ethereum nodes, while currently, that number has dropped to 12%.

Now, it appears that Hetzner has cracked down on Solana validators, taking more than 1,000 of them offline.

Delegators and validators affected by Hetzner’s move will have to find suitable alternatives to resume earning staking rewards. Indeed, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has urged network participants to move their activities to other cloud/hosting platforms.

Solana crypto validators

In August, the Solana Foundation released a report on the health of the blockchain. According to the report, the network consists of 3,400 people scattered around the world, but especially in Germany with 21%, followed by the US with just over 20% and then Ireland with 9.5% of validators.

The latest on the Solana crypto

Solana, in collaboration with the company OSOM, recently launched the first crypto-smartphone. The announcement had already been anticipated in June this year, and the smartphone, based on the OSOM OV1 phone, had been on the market for some time. 

By the end of September, Solana’s NFTs had also reached their all-time high in terms of volume, when 312,000 Non-Fungible Tokens were minted in a single day.