Solana crashes, SOL prices tumble as network scrambles to restart

Solana,the blockchain and crypto industry's most recent darling, is now seeing a dramatic change of fortunes as technical issues overwhelmed the network and its native token SOL's prices plunged more than 25% from its all-time high of 214.96 just last week. The company behind Solana first admitted that the network's mainnet-beta was experiencing intermittent instability before confirming this was due to a massive increase in transaction load, peaking at 400,000 transactions per second.

This overload caused the Solana network to start forking, which, in turn, resulted in some nodes going offline. Shortly thereafter, Solana's validator community opted to restart the network, providing the rest of the community with instructions on how to do this via its Twitter feed and its Discord channel. The network restart was successful and supporting systems are expected to also recover as of this publishing time, according to Solana.

While Solana’s crash may have come as a surprise after the network’s recent price runup, industry watchers say Solana has fallen victim to its own success and that there’s not much to be too concerned about — yet. 

“This is an early teething problem for all blockchains,” said George Harrap, co-founder of Step Finance, a platform that tracks positions for Solana and other networks, in an email to Forkast.News. “Ethereum experienced this in 2016. These are normal growing pains for any blockchain, and the influx of new Solana users wanting to capitalize on the burgeoning Solana opportunities contributed to this event.”

Dubbed an “Ethereum killer,” Solana attracted a great deal of investor excitement in the past month, breaking into the crypto top 10 for the first time and then leaping over Dogecoin, Polkadot and even XRP to reach as high as the sixth position. At the peak of its success, Solana had a market cap of over US$60 billion. Solana has since shed roughly US$12 billion in market cap and slide back into seventh position, back behind XRP. SOL is trading at US$164.40 at publishing time.

Source:forkast.news