Solana had a difficult time after the downfall of FTX. The blockchain project was closely affiliated with SBF who was a major backer of Solana’s ecosystem. Crucial infrastructure like Serum (SRM) was depending on him. With Solana’s DeFi sector slowly recovering from that blow many community members were enthusiastic at the beginning of 2023. The price action was also more favorable but recently Solana experienced yet another setback.

Why did the Solana blockchain go down again last weekend and how did this happen?

The reasons are yet unknown

The root cause for the outage is still unknown and under investigation by Solana Labs. On Saturday the network performance was degraded and Validators entered a safe mode that constitutes a fail-safe in case of a network-wide problem.

Even though the network consensus was still running, Solana didn’t process any transactions from February 25^th to the next day. Validators chose to intervene by restarting the network and effectively ended the problem on February 26^th after debugging the issue.

With this incident, the long series of network outages continue and experts are wondering if Solana will ever reach a point where those hiccups are eliminated. This problem is severe. Hundreds of millions of Dollars are bound through DeFi protocols on Solana. They became inaccessible for the whole time and the outages indeed raise the question if Solana is mature enough to serve as a blockchain for serious financial businesses.

Setbacks are part of a healthy development

This is not the only setback for Solana this year. In January there was an outage for about 18 hours and in December 2022, major NFT projects announced that they are going to migrate. The migration to Ethereum and Polygon is still voluntary, but many spectators felt that these plans are a sign of distrust. DeGods, Y00ts, and DUST announced their plans to migrate until the end of Q1.

It is worth remembering that every technology in this field had to deal with setbacks. Even Bitcoin had to face several struggles in its early days and many people laughed off the idea of a decentralized currency for these reasons. Yet here we are with Bitcoin being one of the most successful assets in terms of price development in the 21st century.

Nobody can tell for sure if Solana will stand the test of time and overcome all these obstacles. What can be observed is that the Solana Foundation and the community put in the work that is needed. According to the platform CryptoMiso, Solana has the third highest activity on Github proving that devs are busy solving problems.