Solana, one of the largest cryptocurrencies, fell more than 12% on Wednesday as its blockchain suffered its second outage in the last month.
The blockchain saw technical problems when its network validators stopped processing for a few hours. Solana applications were also taken offline as a result.
A Twitter account named Solana Status that’s dedicated to keeping up with all things Solana, flagged the outage at about 1 P.M. ET. In order to fix the outage, validators had to restart, following the instructions posted on the Twitter account. The outage lasted about four and a half hours.
Solana has gained popularity in recent years as a faster and cheaper alternative to Ethereum. Its blockchain processes 50,000 transactions per second, and its average cost per transaction is $0.00025, according to the blockchain’s website. Ethereum can handle only about 13 transactions per second and fees are substantially more expensive.
Investors who had been focused largely on Ethereum began diversifying into Solana and other alternative blockchains during last year’s crypto run-up, and Solana closed a $314 million private token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital in June 2021.
But the last year and a half have laid bare the trade-off as the blockchain network has suffered multiple outages. Most recently, on May 1, Solana locked up for several hours before it was similarly brought back online following a restart of its validator network.
