Yet another Solana outage happened last night

As we finished the fifth month of the year, Solana had its fifth outage in 2022 yesterday. The network was down for around four hours, as a result of a feature called Durable Transaction Nonce whose malfunction caused the network’s validators to fall out of synchronization.

Durable Transaction Nonce was implemented on Solana to prevent replay, since Solana transaction contain a nonce field populated with a recent blockhash value, and if the blocklash is too old (currently that is more than two minutes) the transaction is rejected by the network as invalid. Some use cases of the blockchain, such as custodial services, require more time to produce a signature for a transaction, which is the reason the aforementioned mechanics were created.

After the problem was localized, the network restarted with the durable nonce feature disabled until a fix is rolled out “asap”. This led to speculations that the Solana network is vulnerable to DoS attacks and chain splits due to the durable nonce feature.

Naturally, the network’s unreliability led to a decrease in its SOL token’s value, which was steadily keeping the $45 level for about a week, and was starting to grow with the upward trend of the whole market, until the outage happened. SOL prices fell to around $38, only managing to recover to the $40 mark, so far.