Solana Shuts Down Again After Node Issues
To no one's surprise, top 10 smart contract chain, Solana, has shut down again after issues with a misconfigured node. The Solana team stated in a tweet:
The Solana network is experiencing an outage and not processing transactions. Developers across the ecosystem are working on diagnosing the issue and to restart the network. More information will be provided as it becomes available.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) October 1, 2022
It's not a surprise because this happens to Solana very frequently. In fact, 4 complete outages happened on the Solana mainnet in 2022 including today. While today's outage doesn't appear to have been caused by as severe of an issue like bots spamming the network with NFT transactions (which happened in May), it's still a major problem for the developers to address.
Earlier in the summer, top IoT blockchain Helium announced a plan, known as HIP 70, to migrate the blockchain onto Solana to improve network stability. Helium had its own layer 1 blockchain, but the validators ran into issues after a major software upgrade on wireless hotspots, which are the backbone of the network.
This move was met with immediate backlash from the community, as the team chose Solana over many other Layer 1s with higher uptime, like Ethereum. As an Internet of Things blockchain relying on constant network access, outages are highly distasteful. Helium moving its blockchain to Solana is arguably one of the most ironic developments in the crypto world this year.
Later, on October 1st at 7 AM UTC, the Solana mainnet resumed block production.
The constant network outages on Solana prove that it currently is an unstable L1 for regular users. While Solana is still in beta, it is no excuse for a product which doesn't function as described by its architects.
* This story has been updated to include the Solana mainnet resuming block production.
