Solana Blockchain Hit By Technical Difficulty, ‘Intermittent Instability’ Remains Unresolved

Solana, a high-performance, censorship-resistant blockchain, is currently facing difficulties in terms of validating transactions on its network.According to a recent statement from Solana Status, the official media account for Solana’s updates run by the Solana Foundation, the network was experiencing “resource exhaustion” which has caused “intermittent instability” across transactions on its usually high-throughput blockchain.

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.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021

According to details from Solscan, the last successful block propagated on the network was from over seven hours ago, as of the time of writing. Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has attributed the current instability to a flood of transactions from supposed bots on Raydium, a newly-launched decentralized finance protocol. In the linked transaction from block #96538248 it is evident that the transaction has failed, apparently in relation to a swap initiated from the Raydium Liquidity Pool Program V4.

Bots during a raydium ido are flooding the network at 300k txs per second. The queues that forwards txs to block producers grew in size to a point that caused excessive forking. The fix to prioritize messages in this queue was already in the works but wasn’t out yet.

— Anatoly Yakovenko (@aeyakovenko) September 14, 2021

The aforementioned resource exhaustion caused denial of service, according to Solana’s maintainers. This meant that certain transactions were taking longer than the allotted time by the network’s code, hence the transaction blocks could not be finalized properly.

Solana network maintainers have also stated that third parties responsible for validating transactions on the blockchain have been tasked to prepare for a potential restart of the whole system once deemed necessary. This process, if found necessary, would need prior consensus from the Solana community.

A prior technical issue from two weeks ago also caused a period of “intermittent performance degradation” which lasted for over an hour, according to Solana Status. The root cause of this issue still hasn’t been identified, but has been attributed to automated bots spamming the network to purchase newly-launched tokens.

Solana’s price and adoption has been on a roll in the past month, surging over 250% with the $SOL token now trading at $152.81 over a market capitalization of some $74.6 billion.

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