By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
This is one of the major attacks faced by Solana blockchain after SOL major rally over the last month. The validator community has successfully managed to restart the mainnet beta.
The Solana blockchain which has emerged as a strong alternative to Ethereum faced a major downturn on Tuesday, September 14. There appeared a major ‘denial-of-service’ disruption with the Solana blockchain experience intermittent instability for nearly 45 minutes.
The Solana Foundation officially confirmed the downturn through its Twitter handle Solana Status. It noted:
“Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking”.
Solana further explained that the forking led to excessive memory consumption. This resulted in some nodes going offline. Later, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko called the network validators to restart the network.
Soon after the news, the Solana (SOL) price tanked more than 15% to a new weekly low of under $145. However, it has recovered since then partially. As of press time, Solana is trading at a price of $160.89 and a market cap of $47.7 billion.
Off lately, with its staggering bull run, market analysts have been comparing Solana to Ethereum. However, the recent downturn has caused analysts to rethink these claims. Furthermore, with the recent downturn, some have also started questioning Solana’s decentralization.
Last week, Twitter handle Chris Blec question about Solana’s decentralization. The analyst noted that only 20 validators are enough to shut down the network.
OK, I spent much of today looking for decentralization in @solana and I seriously can't find any.
20 validators could collude to shut down the network right now, according to @solanabeach_io.
That's not unstoppable, that's not autonomous, that's not censorship-resistant. pic.twitter.com/kjeY0on5AP
— Chris Blec (@ChrisBlec) September 9, 2021
Solana Successfully Restarts the Blockchain Mainnet Beta
After hitting a major roadblock, the Solana validator community managed to successfully restart the mainnet beta. Solana updated its recent status noting:
“The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25. Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored”.
Although the validators have managed to restart the mainnet beta, Solana’s comparison with Ethereum is too early to make. On Tuesday, September 14, Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden also updated that the Ethereum blockchain faced an attack. The attacker tried to trick a few nodes and published a chain of 550 blocks with invalid proofs.
By seeing that that the Proof-of-work blocks were invalid, the Ethereum nodes rejected them outrightly. “Another great demonstration of how client diversity makes ethereum stronger,” said Van Der Wijden, adding that there’s “no immediate attention required from node operators.”