Off the chain… not in a good way. The solana blockchain went offline for nearly five hours yesterday, grinding all on-chain transactions to a halt. The outage sent the price of solana’s token down 4% before it mostly recovered. The Solana Foundation said a new software patch fixed the immediate problem, but it’s unlikely to resolve the larger one: solana has been going down.
Groundhog Day: A year ago, solana went offline for nearly a day. Solana also suffered a four-hour outage in June 2022, and stopped mining new blocks for seven hours earlier that year, partly because of NFT-hunting bots.
The bigger they are… Yesterday’s downtime comes as solana was making a real play for ethereum’s crypto crown. The blockchain, which some have called an “ethereum killer,” can process way more transactions per second than ethereum. Just last week it saw its decentralized exchange trading volume surpass ethereum’s. And late last year solana’s NFT trading volume and daily active users briefly passed ethereum’s. But repeated outages, which are seen as relatively rare among major blockchains, could jeopardize those gains.