SOL Drops 15% After Solana Network Crashes From Cyber Attack

The high-performance blockchain Solana recently suffered a DoS (Denial of Service) as result of resource exhaustion in the network, which also caused the SOL token to tumble 15 percent. 

On September 14 at 12:38 UTC, Solana experienced “intermittent instability” and stopped processing transactions. The Ethereum Layer-2 solution Arbitrum also suffered an outage. This is the second time this month the protocol has gone down – on September 2, Solana suffered a period of intermittent performance degradation that lasted about an hour. 

Engineers at Solana found a “large increase” in transaction load that peaked at 400,000 TPS, flooding the transaction processing queue. Some users reported their funds were stuck as result of the DoS. To solve the issue, 80 percent of validators had to restart and upgrade the network to version 1.6.25, turning the Solana mainnet up again. 

While the SOL token experienced a slight drop, it has recovered since then, trading at US$157.55 at press time. The SOL token has been one of the top performance coins in the market, delivering its holders more than 13,700 percent growth since the beginning of the year.

Solana Gaining Ground Despite Network Problems

Despite this month’s hurdles, Solana has managed to gain ground, especially in the NFT space. Crypto News Australia reported Solana’s first million-dollar NFT deal this week when it traded a Degenerate Ape Academy token for 5980 SOL, worth US$1.11 million at the time.

There are several projects coming to Solana, including Play-to-Earn NFT games which have become a popular trend on social media, especially for users from third world countries who can make a steady income playing crypto games. Solana will soon launch three exciting NFT games to help it gain ground in the blockchain gaming space: Star Atlas, Aurory, and Genopets.