Solana network experienced its first major outage in nearly a year yesterday, marking its 11th time crashing. After approximately five hours of effort, Solana was able to resume normal operations around 11 PM last night by upgrading the validator software to version 1.17.20 and restarting with the assistance of validator operators.
According to official statements, core contributors are currently writing a root cause analysis report, which will be provided once completed. Additionally, this incident led to several exchanges temporarily suspending withdrawal services on the Solana network, which have now been fully restored.
Matthew Sigel, the Director of Digital Asset Research at VanEck, offered his explanation for the Solana outage yesterday. According to him, the crash may have been caused by an error related to the Berkeley Packet Filter loader (BPF loader). The BPF loader is a critical mechanism used for deploying upgrades and executing programs on Solana.
The issue seems to stem from a previous Solana Improvement Proposal (0093) that made modifications to the BPF loader, including preventing the use of unnecessary metadata in BPF. The bug introduced during this upgrade was discovered on the testnet, and while there is a solution available, it has not been implemented yet due to still being in the testing phase. It is speculated that this bug may have been triggered intentionally, resulting in the Solana network crash.
Furthermore, Sigel expressed confidence that Solana will not encounter the same issue again. He believes that this outage event was caused by specific problems arising from Solana’s experimental nature and ongoing development process, and he is confident that solutions for this issue are already being developed.
On the other hand, Sigel expressed concerns about the potential subsequent effects after the network restart. He anticipates a surge in DeFi activities once the network is back online, as arbitrage bots will seek to exploit all available arbitrage opportunities. Some estimates suggest that these activities could reach a maximum extractable value (MEV) of up to $25 million. These activities may once again lead to network crashes.
Additionally, this situation may slow down the pace of innovation on Solana, as future Solana Improvement Proposals (SMIPs) will undergo more rigorous discussions. These discussions will include reforms to the fee market, which may serve as an indication of this dynamic.
Following the Solana network outage yesterday, the price of SOL dropped by nearly 4% from around $96 to a low of $92.88. As the network resumed normal operations, the SOL price rebounded to pre-crash levels and further increased, reaching around $95.31 at the time of writing, a slight decrease of 0.44% in the past 24 hours.
