Solana goes 20 hours without producing blocks and restarts its network

Solana network goes 20 hours without blocks and restarts its mainnet

Solana prides itself on being unstoppable. It has gone more than 20 hours without producing blocks. The chain that sold itself as the Ethereum killer began the episode with more than four straight hours without a single block, and it didn’t get back up on its own: the mainnet had to be restarted. The diagnosis circulating points to a design flaw that kicks in just when people show up: with high traffic, nodes run out of RAM. A patch has been published that, according to the official narrative, fixes it. The network, meanwhile, is down.

Why did the Solana network go down and how long was it offline?

The clock didn’t stop: first four hours without blocks, then ten, then seventeen, twenty and even a 24-hour stretch of an inoperative network. This isn’t a one-off outage, it’s a pattern —there was another in December— and the foundation’s response was to unilaterally restart the network. The verdict from part of the crypto audience is devastating: if it has to be switched off and on again from an office, it’s neither unstoppable nor decentralized. And when it works, according to a log that was circulated, transactions fail 75% of the time.

Raydium’s IDO and the bots: the volume-collapse hypothesis

The most repeated explanation points to a Raydium IDO. An initial token sale that concentrated thousands of bots bidding in the same second. The result, in the words of someone who trinc it live: the bots sprang into action and the network buckled under the volume. The chain boasts thousands of transactions per second. The bottleneck appears, precisely, when those transactions are actually needed. It’s the bill for selling theoretical capacity as if it were proven capacity.

Why SOL’s price didn’t move while the network was down

Here’s the uncomfortable detail. Without transfers, there are no on-chain buys or sells, so the price should have frozen. It didn’t. The reason came from one operator: centralized exchanges can match trades internally without touching the blockchain. The token trades on each platform’s private database, not on the network it is named after. When the market did react, it did so with a -45% in a day. Weeks later, the price was back at 140 euros and the machinery was working again.

18,77 million SOL ready to be sold and the shadow of FTX

The blow nobody can digest comes on the supply side. When epoch 370 closed, 18.775.348 SOL —about 330 million dollars— were unlocked and ready to be withdrawn and sold. It’s a weight on the price. Add the ecosystem’s exposure to the FTX scandal through Alameda, which had investments in SOL. Less liquidity, more tokens looking for an exit and a buyer who no longer shows up: the combination explains the bloodletting better than any technical chart.

The Slope hack: 43.500 SOL and a chain that didn’t fail

It’s worth separating two things that get mixed up. The network outage is one thing; the theft is another. Here Slope comes in: one affected user puts the amount stolen from their wallet at 43.500 SOL. The clarification made by another participant is the technical key: the blockchain had no problem at all; it was a hack of hot wallets in the ecosystem. In other words, private keys were stored where they shouldn’t have been; the network didn’t break. Distinguishing the two matters when assessing the real risk.

Bitcoin, Ethereum and the rest: the uncomfortable comparison

The comparison with Bitcoin hurts the most: 11 years producing blocks every 10 minutes, like clockwork, without anyone restarting anything. Against that, a chain that shuts down when volume gets tight. The fashionable alternative doesn’t help the narrative either: some argue that Ethereum’s layer-2 solutions will end up swallowing the would-be Ethereum killers. And then there are the usual skeptics, who see a casino with new names, except now gambling addiction is disguised as a tech project. Those who bought at 216 dollars or put in 5.000 euros at 150 look at the chart and stay quiet.

With 18,77 million SOL waiting their turn to hit the market and a network that restarts when volume gets tight, betting on a clean recovery requires quite a bit of faith. If the pattern repeats, SOL will be operational again in a few hours and the price will stay where it was. The problem isn’t this crash: it’s how many times it can repeat before capital stops waiting.