Solana token rebounds after multi-hour network outage

The SOL token jumped as much as 3% to $23.33 over a few hours, after it had plummeted to a seven-day low of $21.72 over the weekend. The token later retreated to $22.88.

On Saturday, the blockchain experienced a major lag in its transaction processing that eventually led to a complete stall, which left users unable to trade or transfer crypto assets on-chain. 

Engineers debugging the issue couldn’t immediately identify the cause, but the community of validators, which help issue transactions on the network, rolled back a recent update to the blockchain’s software to try to solve the problem. That change was not enough to fix the issue, and the Solana blockchain had to be restarted—after being down for almost a day. 

The network came back online at about 8:30 p.m. ET on Saturday, according to a report by Solana.

The most recent outage is reminiscent of the blockchain’s performance in 2022, where the network went down several times. In May, bots caused a multi-hour outage, the network fell again for hours in June, and finally in October, a single node also took down Solana. The consistent tech issues with the network have spurred criticism from crypto users who have questioned how Solana’s token, SOL, can continue to be among the top cryptocurrencies.

Solana is down for a co-ordinated restart

A tech issue was throttling transactions and the blockchain started to unexpectedly fork

How is this pos in the top 10 crypto list?

— Crypto Tea (@CryptoTea_) February 25, 2023

Yet even after the latest outage, it’s evident that some traders appeared eager to push SOL toward a recovery.

The two most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ether, were also up slightly on Monday. Bitcoin was up 0.4% to $23,300, while Ethereum led the day up 2% to about $1,600, according to CoinMarketCap.