Solana nearly froze on Wednesday morning when a routing glitch at a major data center provider knocked almost 29% of the network’s staked tokens offline, staking platform Marinade said.
Finality, the point at which blockchain transactions become irreversible, stops if more than a third of the coins staked go dark. Staking refers to act of locking coins in a blockchain network to secure it in return for rewards.
Marinade said that the network came within about 20 million tokens of that threshold. Roughly 90 validators were hit and together lost 333 SOL in rewards, a relatively small sum that will be covered by “validator bonds.”
“If delinquency had gone past a third, nothing finalizes for anyone holding SOL anywhere, and there's no bond for that. The February 2024 halt took about five hours to restart,” Marinade said in an explainer post.
Solana is one of the leading smart contract blockchains, with assets worth $4.3 billion locked in DeFi protocols operating on the network. The blockchain has built a reputation as a faster and cheaper alternative to industry leader Ethereum, but has faced several outages in the past.
