Once again, it appears that the Solana network has been forced to restart following an unknown error that forced the network to be downgraded. The outage comes as no surprise with many in the Solana community already frustrated with frequent outages in the past. 

Trouble for the network might be brewing though as the outage comes at a time when the Solana network has seemingly reached a new low point in its operations following a series of similar issues in 2022 that were compounded by the collapse of FTX, causing a mass exodus from the network. 

What happened

According to a statement released by the Solana Foundation, the mainnet encountered a severe performance disruption that the validator community deemed would require a network restart to solve. 

The validators decided to enter a “vote only” mode which is akin to a safe mode. Once activated, only the consensus remained in operation while transactions of all sorts on the network were paused. 

Once the issue was identified, validators voted to downgrade the blockchain to a previous version (v1.13.6) which was more stable. Once downgraded, the network was then upgraded back to v1.14 which is the more recent version.

Unfortunately, developers are still unable to figure out what caused the disruption and are still examining the problem to see what caused it which could be a problem going forward for a shrinking community. 

Is the network dead?

As expected, the community was not happy with the situation. The number of outages on the Solana network has been so frequent that many people are starting to lose trust in a team that has routinely announced errors.

With the heavy drop in value last year, Solana’s community is already being tested as many projects and services continue to leave the network for more stable blockchains. 

The errors look even worse when compared to its rival blockchain Ethereum which executed one of the most technically challenging updates to the network last year when the blockchain merged from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Once dubbed the Ethereum killer, it seems the only blockchain that Solana is capable of killing is itself. 

Attempts from polygon to revive things?

Fortunately, as BCCN3 reported earlier, other networks are looking to bring their expertise to the network. Polygon has made an effort to create a Solana virtual machine that could make it easier for people to interact with the blockchain through the Polygon network which has become incredibly reliable as of late with a large number of companies looking to use it for their experimental web3 services.  

Although this could be more of a benefit to Polygon than Solana, it still shows that developers in the web3 industry still see some value in the Solana network and are doing their best to keep it active and relevant to the wider web3 community. 

Is Aptos winning the rivalry?

The Aptos network, on the other hand, could pose a lot of issues for the future of Solana. Aptos uses the Move programming language, which was derived from the Rust language and could become an attractive option for Solana developers in the future if it proves to be a more reliable network. 

This could cause a serious issue for Solana as the network is already seeing teams leave the network. If Solana wishes to remain relevant at all they need to begin solving this problem immediately because more powerful blockchains exist without frequent network outages.