Today, the Solana blockchain suddenly stopped validating crypto transactions.
It was a temporary issue that took about a couple of hours to be identified and resolved.
Summary
The problem with Solana: crypto transactions blocked
The causes that have blocked the validation of transactions have not yet been publicly revealed, but the problem has been acknowledged and disclosed by the official Solana team.
Initially, the team simply communicated that its engineers were investigating a Mainnet interruption and that they would publish further information as soon as it became available.
After about an hour, they notified that the engineers were preparing a new version of the validation software, within which they had inserted a patch to solve the problem that caused the cluster to stop.
So the problem encountered was so serious that the old versions of the validation software must be completely discontinued and replaced by the newly patched software today.
After a few minutes from that announcement, they have published the new software.
In order to restart the Solana blockchain, it was necessary for the validator nodes to replace the previous software with the new one released today, by downloading it, installing it, and restarting.
After more than two and a half hours from the first announcement, it was revealed that the Solana blockchain was ready to resume validating transactions.
Now we are waiting for at least 80% of the staking to be moved to the updated nodes so that the network can effectively be restarted.
The past problems
This is not the first time that Solana encounters similar problems.
The last time it happened was about 12 months ago, in February 2023, and since then it seemed that this type of issue had been resolved.
And instead today it reappeared, although it seems that the project development team managed to intervene quickly by identifying and solving the problem.
In the past, there have been several similar interruptions, to the point that they had even had a negative impact on the price of the cryptocurrency. Today, however, the impact has been minimal.
The fact that it took only two and a half hours to identify and solve the problem is probably enough to understand that it was not a particularly serious issue, so for now all the funds seem to be safe.
The market, in fact, did not get scared much.
The price of SOL
By analyzing the price trend of Solana’s native cryptocurrency, SOL, in US dollars, it is discovered that today it briefly dropped to around $93, but then quickly rebounded and finally returned to around $94.
However, on some illiquid exchanges there have been larger fluctuations, but they have all returned to normal in a very short time.
Note that before the first news of the block spread, the price was above $96, so despite the rebound, the current price is still slightly lower than yesterday’s.
However, already on Monday, without any technical issues, the price had dropped to $94, so today’s fluctuation is perfectly within the average for the period.
Actually, after mid-January it had started a descent that had brought it down to below $80, but only to quickly bounce back over $105 by the end of the month.
It should not be forgotten that just five months ago the price was $20, and that four months ago it was still at $23.
The recent boom started at the end of October, when it rose above $30 for the first time since July 2023. However, unlike this summer, the rally did not stop there, as it rose above $40 at the beginning of November, a level not seen since October 2022, before the collapse of FTX.
The upward trend, however, did not stop even at that point, so much so that by the end of December it even exceeded $120, a level not reached since April 2022, before the Terra/Luna implosion.
Only at that point did the rise stop, stabilizing just above $90, which was the price it had between January and March 2022.
Solana’s centralization and the discomfort of blocked crypto transactions
These events reveal that, although Solana’s blockchain is technically decentralized, the crypto project as a whole is not truly decentralized.
Everything revolves around the activity of the company Solana Labs, whose CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko, is also the co-founder of the Solana project and the inventor of the Proof-of-History on which it is based.
In fact, a good part of Solana’s success is due to the marketing activity of Yakovenko’s company, such as the one related to Solana Mobile’s smartphone, whose pre-sales are experiencing a boom.
The limited decentralization of the Solana crypto project is also the basis for the many doubts that some analysts have about its long-term development, as any serious problems that Yakovenko’s company may have could have a very negative impact on the project itself.
