The Solana ecosystem faced yet another outage this week. This time, it was caused by data generated from offline transactions on the platform. In total, the network was down for four hours, affecting virtually all SOL crypto asset transactions in the crypto market.
The Solana problem happened on June 1, 2022. Validators of nodes on the platform had to restart the network after the bug was identified in transactions known as “durable nonce”.
Only after stopping these types of transactions was the network restarted. However, these transactions are suspended in Solana until the problem is completely fixed.
Bug in Solana network
Solana’s consensus engine suffered instability caused by offline transactions. Although durable nonce transactions represent a small portion of transactions on the network, this type of transaction is growing on exchanges.
Solana network validator Stakewiz explained on Twitter that this type of transaction does not require a direct validation on a new data block. Although this authorization can expire in two minutes, the growth of this type of transaction was responsible for the platform’s bug.
“A durable nonce is a way in which a transaction can be signed offline in advance, without requiring a recent block hash, which expires after two minutes. The use of durable nonce has increased recently, mainly by exchanges, possibly due to their cold storage configurations”.
This is not the first time the Solana network has suffered instability in the crypto market. For example, in late 2021, the platform faced problems due to “resource exhaustion”.
Another failure at Solana happened in early May 2022. The platform was down for seven hours after a bot that issues NFTs congested the network with over 4 million transactions per second.
