After a tumultuous weekend for the underlying blockchain, native cryptocurrency Solana once again showed resilience as prices rebounded on Monday.
The SOL token jumped as much as 3% to $23.33 within hours, after falling to a seven-day low of $21.72 over the weekend. The token later retreated to $22.88.
On Saturday, the blockchain experienced a major delay in the transaction process that eventually led to a complete stall, which prevented users from trading or transferring crypto assets on-chain.
Engineers debugging the problem could not immediately identify the cause, but the community of validators, who help issue transactions on the network, returned a new update to the blockchain software to try to solve the problem. These changes weren’t enough to fix the problem, and the Solana block had to be restarted—after going down for almost a day.
The network came back online around 8:30 a.m. ET Friday, according to a report by Solana.
The most recent outage is like the performance of the blockchain in 2022, where the network went down several times. In May, the bot caused several hours of disruption, the network collapsed again for several hours in June, and finally in October, one node also took down Solana. Consistent technology issues with the network have led to criticism from crypto users who have questioned how Solana’s token, SOL, can continue to be one of the top cryptocurrencies.
Solana went down for a coordinated restart
Technological problems speed up transactions and blockers start unexpectedly
How does this rank in the top 10 crypto list?
— Crypto Tea (@CryptoTea_) February 25, 2023
But even after the latest disruption, it’s clear that some traders seem eager to push SOL into recovery.
The two most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ether, also rose slightly on Friday. Bitcoin rose 0.4% to $23,300, while Ethereum led the day up 2% to about $1,600, according to CoinMarketCap.
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