SOL Dips 4% Following Solana Network Outage

The price of SOL has dipped by more than 3% following a “major outage” on the Solana network.

According to CoinGecko data, the Solana price dropped as low as $93.36 before recovering to its current level of $93.70, down 4.1% on the day and more than 11% on the week.

The Solana network’s status page shows a “major outage” on the mainnet-beta cluster, with a notice stating: “Engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta” as of 10:22 a.m. UTC.

According to the Solana Status Twitter account, which provides status updates for the network, engineers have released a new validator software update, version v1.17.20, which addresses “an issue which caused the cluster to halt.”

This isn’t the first time the Solana network has suffered an outage, but it is the first time in a long time. In February 2023, the network went down for almost 20 hours. It happened just months after Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said that the forthcoming Firedancer client offered a “long-term fix” to address the issue.

An early version of the validator client, dubbed “Frankendancer” went live on a testnet in November. Jump Crypto, which has been developing the new validator client, said its goal is to move Frankendancer to Solana mainnet by summer and have Firedancer on mainnet as “a fully independent validator by the end of 2024.”

Broadly speaking, some of Solana’s network outages have been caused by issues with the software that its validators use to run nodes. The goal of building Firedancer—and thereby making the network more resilient—is to have a backup piece of software that validators can use if there’s an issue with the other.

It’s not all been bad news for Solana, though; last week, network activity surged, while token trading on Solana decentralized exchanges briefly flipped that of Ethereum DEXs amid excitement over the looming Jupiter airdrop.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.