Solana (SOL) mainnet’s operations have resumed after an outage that ran for around five hours. Engineers are still monitoring the blockchain and the root cause of the problem is still being investigated.
What Happened to Solana?
Solana (SOL) mainnet beta went down by around 9:53 AM UTC today. So far, this was the first major outage for the network in over a year.
Operations resumed by around 2:57 PM UTC today according to an update by @SolanaStatus via X (formerly Twitter). This was after engineers managed to successfully upgrade the Solana protocol to version 1.17.20 and the validators conducted a restart of the cluster.
The exact reason for Solana’s halt in operations remains a mystery as we are yet to get an official report from its core contributors. Engineers are likewise continuously observing the network to ensure that everything is back to normal.
As we await an official update, the event noticeably got the crypto community riled up as they feared for the worst. During the blackout, the social media network was abuzz with FUD claiming that the network may be under attack.
Again, we will never know the root of the issue until the Solana team gets to the bottom of the problem and we get the real experts talking.
Solana Now
SOL definitely took a hit amid the fear and confusion caused by the first instance of the outage at around 10:00 AM UTC. Based on the hourly chart, it dipped by 2.16% from $96.05 to $93.98 during that time. The succeeding hour even saw it dive down to $93.28 before recovering the $94 level.
As of this writing at around 3:55 PM UTC, Solana continues to regain its footing at the $95 mark while only displaying a 0.71% loss on the 24-hour chart. The trading volume stalled at a 1.16% gain in the same timeframe as around $1.63 billion worth of SOL moved between wallets and exchanges. Meanwhile, the total market value of the token sits at $41.59 billion today, which puts it at the fifth rank in terms of market cap among other mainstream cryptocurrencies.
SOL’s all-time high came on November 7, 2021, at $260.06, mirroring the same uptrend experienced by Bitcoin at the time to its record-level peak of $68,789.63 per BTC on the 10th of the same month. It’s still 63.87% away from its all-time high but with the Bitcoin halving coming up, coupled with the growing institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies and economic uncertainties in the US, analysts are expecting a wild ride up for the digital asset over the current year.