Solana’s Market Value Plunges $20 Billion After Outage
This is a bump in the road for the network, as many investors have favored it over other altcoins.
The sol coin, which last week hit record highs in spite of a widespread sell-off in the cryptocurrency market, is the native token of the solana network. It was last up around 1.0% at $159.90 according to coinmarketcap.com. On September 9, it hit a record above $200.
In a recent week of technical challenges for Solana engineers, SOL price dropped to $135.25 on Friday, 17 September 2021. Transaction throughput reached a peak of 400000 transactions per second, which caused the network to start forking, resulting in increased memory consumption. This caused some nodes to go offline which occurred for approximately 17 hours. The network was successfully restarted by engineers and all nodes are back online, as of 16 September 2021. Solana said it will continue to implement fixes, and promised to give a detailed report on the outage in the ensuing weeks.
Some experts have pointed to Ethereum’s initial rollout having similar problems, and as such see this as a learning curve for other smart-contract based blockchains. Kyle Samani, a managing partner at Multicoin Capital, sees Solana’s network as a strong competitor to Ethereum, despite its teething problems. Solana is a smart-contract based blockchain, supporting decentralized finance and applications.
Solana’s incorporation of smart contracts have helped it to take advantage of the surge in the NFT markets.
The network is one of the youngest blockchains in operation. Solana’s whitepaper was released in 2017, compared with the bitcoin whitepaper, which surfaced in 2008 and the ethereum whitepaper, which was published in 2013.
