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Blockchain for Red-Hot Crypto Solana Restarts After Hitting Snag

The blockchain network underpinning Solana, one of this year’s fastest-rising cryptocurrencies, has stopped processing blocks.

Blockchain for Red-Hot Crypto Solana Restarts After Hitting Snag
The Solana logo on a smartphone arranged in the Brooklyn Borough of New York, U.S. (Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg)

The network underpinning one of this year’s fastest-rising cryptocurrencies has been restarted after having problems validating transactions, according to a Twitter account run by the Solana project.

The issue stemmed from “resource exhaustion” in the network that caused denial of service, one tweet from the Solana Status account said Tuesday. Third parties that validate transactions on the blockchain elected to coordinate a restart of the network, the developer team said later in a statement. 

Solana’s validator community successfully restarted the network, according to a Twitter post Wednesday. Solana’s status page showed a “major outage” of more than 17 hours for Tuesday, and another major outage of nine minutes for Wednesday, though it was indicating “All Systems Operational” as of about 7:15 a.m. in London.

“It has some interesting technical features, but realistically Solana hasn’t yet been fully tested in a live setting,” said Strah Savic, head of data and analytics at FRNT Financial. “What we are likely seeing is the experimental nature of blockchain tech playing out.”

The price of Solana has more than doubled over the past 30 days to trade at $165.10, according to CoinGecko.com, though that’s down from a high around $211 on Thursday. It’s up more than 30,000% from its low of 50 cents in May 2020, and with a value of about $48 billion is the seventh-biggest cryptocurrency.

The issues on Tuesday meant that other crypto protocols built on top of the Solana blockchain had problems connecting to the network. That includes Pyth, one of the highest-profile applications, which feeds DeFi projects price data on stocks, cryptocurrencies and other assets sourced from some of the world’s biggest trading firms such as Jump Trading Group, Virtu Financial Inc. and DRW Holdings LLC.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.