Smart contract blockchain Solana nearly froze Wednesday, Marinade Finance says
- A routing failure at a major data center provider briefly knocked nearly 29% of Solana’s staked tokens offline, bringing the network close to a full halt, according to staking platform Marinade.
- Because Solana stops finalizing transactions if more than one-third of staked tokens go offline, the incident left the network within about 20 million tokens of a freeze similar to a five-hour outage in February 2024.
- The glitch, traced to a bad internet route originating at Teraswitch’s Miami facility and spreading to data centers in Europe and Asia, exposed the risk of relying on a single connectivity provider that controlled more than a quarter of all staked tokens.
Solana nearly froze on Wednesday morning when a routing glitch at a major data center provider knocked almost 29% of the network’s staked tokens offline, staking platform Marinade said.
Finality, the point at which blockchain transactions become irreversible, stops if more than a third of the coins staked go dark. Staking refers to act of locking coins in a blockchain network to secure it in return for rewards.
Marinade said that the network came within about 20 million tokens of that threshold. Roughly 90 validators were hit and together lost 333 SOL in rewards, a relatively small sum that will be covered by “validator bonds.”
“If delinquency had gone past a third, nothing finalizes for anyone holding SOL anywhere, and there's no bond for that. The February 2024 halt took about five hours to restart,” Marinade said in an explainer post.
Solana is one of the leading smart contract blockchains, with assets worth $4.3 billion locked in DeFi protocols operating on the network. The blockchain has built a reputation as a faster and cheaper alternative to industry leader Ethereum, but has faced several outages in the past.