Solana Goes Down For Hours Due To Resource Exhaustion

Solana goes down unexpectedly and now validators could have to restart the blockchain network due to resource exhaustion. The network got overwhelmed by transactions so let’s see what it means for Solana in our latest crypto news.

Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko attributed the downtime to the surge in transactions from bots on the Raydium Defi protocol. Solana is considered a rival blockchain network to Ethereum and one whose crypto surged in value and activity over the past few months. However, now Solana goes down for four hours as of the time of writing. The reports show that the last Solana block was produced before 12 PM UTC and the official support Twitter account tweeted that the mainnet beta-network experienced some intermittent instability:

“Resource exhaustion in the network is causing a denial of service, engineers are working towards a resolution. Validators are preparing for a potential restart if necessary.”

Reminder that the @grapeprotocol IDO and GRAPE-USDC LP lauches at 12:00 UTC today! 🍇

AcceleRaytor $GRAPE token claim also from this time.

Fusion pool reward emissions will start shortly after to give time to LP. pic.twitter.com/OaHyxV3C2M

— Raydium (@RaydiumProtocol) September 14, 2021

The CEO Anatoly Yakovenko tweeted to the network validators that it’s beta time and urged them to join Solana’s Discord server and to coordinate the potential response. Yakovenko also said that the issue is due to overwhelming transaction volume from the bots on the initial decentralized exchange offering for a project. The IDOs is a type of public token sale similar to an ICO but it happens on a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange rather than a centralized one. The IDO in question was taking place on Raydium which is akin to decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap on Ethereum. The IDO was for Grape Protocol and other NFT projects.

According to Yakovenko, the bots flooded the network with 300,000 transactions per second and caused plenty of problems for Solana’s transaction queues. When one user replied asking Solana to disallow the first-come-first-serve IDO launches, Yakovenko said:

“Nah, just need to fix the bugs. Part of life.”

Solana mainnet-beta is experiencing intermittent instability. This began approximately 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the issue.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021

He also said that the issues today were already being addressed but that the software wasn’t yet available. The downtime led to plenty of confusion around the community especially for the users trying to use the blockchain network and transact funds. Solana users on Discord reported transaction failures and plenty of NFNT projects postponed their airdrops. Solana is seen as a scalable version of Ethereum capable of handling thousands of times more transactions per second while using less energy. The SOL crypto was surging in value recently and increase from $35 to an ATH of $213 a week ago.