Solana Blockchain Faces Yet Another Outage With Traders Losing Confidence

24. Jan 2022 Posted by Akolkar B on News

Solana, the Ethereum Layer -1 competitor and one of the top-performing blockchain networks last year has been facing severe outages over the last few weeks. Over the last weekend, the Solana blockchain suffered yet another 48 hour outage leaving the network in a downtime.

The Solana engineers released a notice last Saturday, January 22 which read: “Solana mainnet beta is experiencing high levels of network congestion. The last 24 hours have shown these systems need to be improved to meet the demands of users, and support the more complex transactions now common on the network”.

However, the latest update shows that the network has been restored once again. The Solana team has also promised some major fixes in the upcoming weeks. They wrote: “These forthcoming releases are aimed at improving the state of the network, with more improvements expected to roll out in the next 8-12 weeks. Many of these features are currently live on Testnet, where they are being rigorously tested.”

But this frequent abruptions in the Solana blockchain performance has caused traders to move towards other preferred solutions.

Probably, this was the sixth time that the Solana blockchain suffered an outage in the last three months. While many once said that Solana will replace Ethereum, this lacklustre performance has put Solana’s capabilities under doubt.

On the other hand, Solana has been losing its market share in the decetralized finance (DeFi) space as well. Owing to the outages, the total value locked (TVL) on the Solana blockchain has dropped 50% from the November levels.

As of data, Solana’s DeFi TVL stands at $7.5 billion which makes it the sixth-largest Defi platform. As one point, Solana was the second-largest DeFi platform after Ethereum. However, after frequent outages, Solana has been losing its position to other competitors with players like Fantom, Avalanche, Terra taking the lead.

As a result, Solana’s native cryptocurrency SOL has also faced a major price crash along with the broader market correction. The SOL price is down more than 50% since November 2021. Earlier today, the SOL price tanked over 6% slipping under $90.

Besides, Solana has been also slipping down the ranks and moved out of the top-five crypto list. Currently, Solana (SOL) is the eighth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.