Block production on Solana Mainnet Beta has halted. This was proclaimed on Twitter by Solana Status.
There has never been such a thing, and, here it is again. On the first of June, a post that a block in production of Solana Mainnet had stopped appeared on Solana Status twitter.
This time, the reason for stoppage in the production of blocks was a bug in the consensus mechanism. The most interesting thing is that the developers knew about the bug and did not fix it, because it hadn’t cause a problems before.
The day after the block production was stopped, Austin Federa, spokesperson for Solana Labs, and Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana Labs co-founder, held a technical conversation on the recent Solana Mainnet Beta outage.
Austin Federa, confirmed that validators restarted only after durable nonce transactions, a method by which transactions can be signed offline without requiring a recent block hash, were disabled. These niche transactions were double counted by the network’s validators at two different block heights instead of being treated as one transaction. This resulted in a breakdown of Solana’s consensus mechanism.
“This was probably a bug that existed for a while but never really became an issue because it isn’t something that most people use.”
Now the Solana network is working fine. Even the problem with the clock was fixed, so Solana is now keeping up with the times (hah). The production of blocks stopped for only four hours, which is not much compared to other network collapses.
Against the background of the block production shutdown, SOL plummeted from $45.37 to $38.96, and then to $36.23 altogether. Now the price of the cryptocurrency is steady at around $40.
Solana is a fairly young project, which is why they have encountered problems so often. Recently, the young NFT team Akutars had $33 million locked due to an exploit. Even the giants of the crypto market faced similar problems at the beginning of their development. For example, Bitcoin had a major error in 2010, which was called the “Value overflow incident”. This error allowed attackers to transfer 184 billion bitcoins to two addresses. To fix the incident, the block chain had to be forked.
For Solana, this year, so far, it’s been hard. This failure is far from the first in a year. Therefore, once again we hope the developers of Solana will avoid future problems and we continue to observe.
