Solana Blockchain Reports 'Outage' As Developers Investigate Exploit

The Solana SOL/USD network went offline briefly on Tuesday night following reports that private keys to hot wallets in the ecosystem had been compromised.

What Happened: Solana Status reported a “minor service outage” prompting speculation from market participants that developers had intentionally halted the network to prevent the ongoing exploit from worsening.

“RPC Nodes are restoring service, appears to have been a concerted effort by some well-intentioned devs who thought spamming RPC would slow attacker, though in reality, it has just caused massive confusion,” wrote Solana validator operator Stakewiz on Twitter.

Ben Sparango, head of DeFi at Solana Labs, confirmed that the partial outage status was reflective of the RPC nodes pinging down. 

The RPC nodes' status means that the wallets and block explorers may not work as expected despite the fact that the underlying blockchain is still running.

Solana Status asked victims of the hack to share data of their compromised wallets in a typeform to the Solana Foundation.

At press time, investigations were still underway and the root cause of the exploit remained unknown.

Price Action: At press time, SOL was trading at $38.04, down 6.4% over 24 hours, as per data from Benzinga Pro.