Here's What Caused The Solana Blockchain Halt On Wednesday

The Solana SOL/USD network was forced to stop block production for four hours on Wednesday.

What Happened: Validators reported the issue around 1 p.m. ET on the Solana Status Twitter page.

Earlier today a bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to nondeterminism when nodes generated different results for the same block, which prevented the network from advancing.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) June 1, 2022

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko told users that the network would restart as soon as possible once the durable nonce feature had been disabled. At the time, the Solana status website reported that on-chain time was running behind that of wall clocks, due to longer-than-normal block times. 

"The issue is completely unrelated to clock drift and the clock drift has nothing to do with the network halting," Solana validator Laine wrote on Twitter.

The bug was related to the “durable nonce” feature of the blockchain, which caused the network to consider some blocks invalid, and as a result consensus cannot be reached.

tldr:
Durable nonce instruction caused part of the network to consider the block is invalid, no consensus could be formed. Network is restating with durable nonce feature disabled. Fix for durable nonces will be out asap. https://t.co/5gZnpCp36N

— T◎lyxNFT,  (@aeyakovenko) June 1, 2022

Around 5 p.m. ET, Solana validators brought the network back online by way of a restart.

Solana is considered an Ethereum ETH/USD killer because of its high-speed transactions with lower transaction fees. However, multiple outages over the last few months have made some industry proponents question the network’s reliability.

See Also: HOW TO BUY SOLANA (SOL)

Price Action: SOL was down 13% over the last 24 hours, as per data from Benzinga Pro. The cryptocurrency is down 84% from its all-time high of $259.