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Solana nears freeze after routing glitch knocks 29% of staked tokens offline

Solana stayed just 20 million tokens shy of the one third staked threshold that would stop transaction finality, after a bad internet route disrupted nearly 90 validators.

Reported · Written up by our desk · Market Structure

Solana nearly hit a network freeze Wednesday after a routing failure briefly took almost 29% of the protocol’s staked tokens offline, according to staking platform Marinade. The incident left the blockchain close to a full halt because Solana stops finalizing transactions if more than one third of staked tokens go dark.

Marinade said the problem was triggered by a bad internet route originating at Teraswitch’s Miami facility and spreading to data centers in Europe and Asia, which cut off validators in locations including London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo. North America remained online, and the issue was fixed in about 10 minutes, with traffic flowing again by 4:16 a.m. UTC.

The platform added that the disruption affected roughly 90 validators and resulted in 333 SOL in lost rewards, a relatively small amount expected to be covered by validator bonds. Marinade warned that if delinquency had passed the one third threshold, nothing would finalize for SOL holders and there would be no bond coverage, noting the February 2024 freeze took about five hours to restart.

CoinDesk reported that Solana is a major smart contract network, with assets worth $4.3 billion locked in DeFi protocols running on it. The latest near-freeze highlights how reliance on a single connectivity provider can concentrate risk when that provider controls more than a quarter of staked tokens.

Latest closeSolana $75.75 ▼0.6%

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