On January 23, Solana’s autonomous rate engine, Solend, released a detailed report on the recent network outages. According to the Network Status Reporter, Solana suffered from network instability and outages that lasted for nearly 30 hours from January 21st to 22nd. This is Solana’s second network outage this month, following a service outage and poor performance from January 6th to 12th. The autopsy revealed the following:
“Deposit and withdrawal attempts were often unsuccessful, making it difficult for users to save their accounts from liquidation.” It added that there was some volatility in the price feed leading to “illegal liquidation”.
The fundamental reason for the current outage turned into a marketplace crash. Solend said it has created a possibility for arbitrage.”Clearing bots and arbitrage bots have begun to send large numbers of transactions to win clearing and arbitrage.” The bots are networked because the transactions were cheap and profitable.The arbitrage was successful in spamming the network. Due to the excessive load, we could not rule out duplicate transactions, so the validator stopped working. “Thousands of duplicate bot transactions have also drowned legitimate user transactions”.
Several modifications have been made to the system to restore network functionality, and engineers have released version 1.8.14 to mitigate the worst problem. Solend said that 50 percent of the clearing penalty will be refunded to users cleared during the incident and 100 percent to users affected by abnormal fluctuations in the SOL feed.
CryptoTwitter has unleashed the standard criticism on Solana, who has repeatedly claimed to be far superior to Ethereum in terms of performance. SOL is currently trading at USD 89, the lowest price since late August, down another 7.7 percent today. The former beloved cryptocurrency has fallen below the market capitalization chart.
