Solana anniversary: From repeated outages to one of crypto's most resilient networks

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Six years of Solana

The beginning

Solana launched its mainnet on March 16, 2020, with the goal of solving the primary challenge of blockchain technology: scalability. Founder Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer, introduced an architecture utilizing Proof of History. This innovation allows the system to process thousands of transactions per second.

The concept of a high-speed and low-cost blockchain immediately distinguished Solana from its competitors. However, the first year of operation revealed that such speed comes with a significant cost. The first major failure occurred on December 4, 2020, when a bug in the Turbine block propagation system stopped the network for approximately six hours. A validator transmitted two conflicting blocks for the same slot, which caused the network to split into separate parts.

How Solana became synonymous with outages

In September 2021, Solana faced an event that effectively defined its reputation. During the Grape Protocol IDO, the network was overwhelmed by bots generating over 300,000 transactions per second. Validators could not handle the load, leading to a 17-hour blockchain shutdown.

The network operated with a severe decline in efficiency in January 2022, as successful transaction rates plummeted to 30%. Just a few weeks later, issues with access to RPC nodes recurred. On April 30, NFT bots overloaded the network again, resulting in seven hours of downtime.

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A series of technical problems continued throughout that same year. On June 1, a bug in the nonce mechanism halted block generation for over four hours. On September 30, an error in fork selection stopped consensus for another eight hours. These disruptions became so frequent that the status “Solana offline” turned into a popular meme within the crypto community.

2022: Breaches, manipulation, and the FTX collapse

Parallel to its technical struggles, Solana suffered from serious security incidents. In February 2022, hackers attacked the Wormhole cross-chain bridge and drained over $320 million. In August, more than 9,000 wallets were compromised due to a private key leak in the Slope wallet provider. Additionally, a trader named Avraham Eisenberg manipulated the Mango Markets protocol in October to withdraw over $100 million.

The most devastating blow arrived in November 2022 with the bankruptcy of the FTX exchange. Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the primary investors and public supporters of Solana and held large positions in the SOL token. Following the collapse of his empire, the price of SOL dropped from approximately $33 to less than $10. This represented a decline of nearly 97% from its 2021 peak of $259. By the end of 2022, the token fell below $8 while the ecosystem lost both developers and liquidity.

Why Solana did not disappear

Despite these challenges, the network continued to function. Problems persisted into 2023, including a validator failure on February 25 that stopped the network for nearly an entire day. In February 2024, the mainnet went down due to a bug that had been identified earlier but not yet patched.

In total, Solana has survived at least seven major outages over six years. These events resulted in more than three days of total downtime, not including periods of performance degradation. Nevertheless, the project survived.

The ecosystem began a gradual recovery after 2023. New projects emerged, and activity in DeFi and NFT sectors returned to growth. Solana eventually became a central hub for a new wave of memecoins and high-frequency trading because of its low fees and rapid processing speeds.

During 2024 and 2025, the network consistently ranked among the leaders in daily transactions and active users. On certain days, it even exceeded Ethereum in these metrics. Infrastructure solutions improved significantly during this time as well. Enhancements to validator performance and client diversity helped reduce the number of critical failures. By its sixth anniversary, SOL was trading in the $90 to $100 range. This was a substantial increase from the post-FTX lows when the price dropped below $8. This recovery is considered one of the most remarkable comebacks in the history of the crypto market.

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Six years later

Today, Solana remains one of the most debated blockchains on the market. It combines high speed and low fees with a history of regular outages and technical risks. Anatoly Yakovenko described these six years as a “six-year anniversary of excellence.” However, a different phrase has gained popularity within the community: “just one more hard quarter.” This phrasing accurately describes the history of Solana. It is not a story of stability but rather a story of a system that constantly finds itself on the brink and manages to return every time.

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