Solana Network Halts Block Production, Here’s An Update On Restart

The Solana network halted block production yet again on Wednesday. This is the ninth such Solana halt that occurred on the blockchain network.

A Solana status update shared on Twitter stated that validator operators are being asked to prepare for a restart. The tweet on Solana halt said,

“Block production on Solana Mainnet Beta has halted. Validator operators should prepare for a restart in mb-validators on Discord.”

‘Prepare For A Restart’

In a subsequent update shared by the team, there were a set of instructions for mainnet beta validators. It said,

“Mainnet Beta Validators: Please follow the restart instructions linked below, and upgrade 1.9.x to 1.9.28 – If you are on 1.10.x please upgrade to 1.10.23”

Ninth Time Outage

There have been multiple outages in the Solana network in the past. In September last year, the network remained inactive for over 10 hours as the blockchain nodes went offline due to excessive memory use.

Earlier this year in January, Binance noted that the SOL network experienced congestion. This had resulted in reduced throughput of the network to several thousands of transactions per second. The outage affected withdrawals on the exchange via the Solana network and led to failed transactions.

Despite all the troubles in the recent past, the network had fared fairly well with respect to the NFT market. As per recent data from crypto analytics platform Messari, Solana’s NFT sales volume took a major jump. This resulted in it becoming the second-largest protocol by the end of the quarter, next to Ethereum at first place.

The network outage led to a steep fall in Solana’s price. As of writing, the coin is trading at $40.59, down 11.24% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. SOL’s current market cap stands at $13 billion and a ranking of 9.

Meanwhile, crypto analysts have been quick to question the network’s repeated outages. They even raised questions on the decentralised nature of the network. An analyst that goes by the name Nick on Twitter asked, “The Solana (SOL) network has been globally halted. How can we call this decentralized?”