Alpha Feed

Solana Liveness Failure (Outage)

Solana had a liveness failure today. Cause unknown but rumor is that it was a client bug. You can track progress in the link in the tweet (https://stakewiz.com/restart). I’ll update this post later when more details are out.

So far market impact is fairly muted which is good for bad debt on DeFi protocols but getting to 80% will take some time, probably at least a few hours (currently at 20%).

*Update 9:55am est: https://x.com/matthew_sigel/status/1754874183807307828 bug seemed to be related to recent upgrade. Was discovered on testnet but mainnet fix was not implemented yet. Speculation that it was triggered on mainnet manually.

**Update 9:57am est: https://x.com/laine_sa_/status/1754881952597909661 network back up. Estimated time from failure to back up ~5hrs, from restart to back up ~3hrs.

***adding my response here to Philipp’s question:

it can’t be a leading defi chain with liveness failures. they’ve been lucky so far that price has been fairly stable during these, but what if there’s a big macro event at the same time? it would be bad.

it doesn’t matter as much for other stuff like depin, payments (code still ran), nfts, etc, but the highest value in a blockchain is having a vibrant defi economy, and constant liveness failures definitely puts that at risk.

i am hopeful that with firedancer + other clients that eventually they will figure out a fallback method (eg. one client has bug, fallback to secondary to continue) but it’s theoretical and a lot of nuance to how that would work. more client diversity is sorely needed.

I am very bullish on Solana, however, this outage really makes me think about my thesis. For many defi applications it’s very problematic, because you can get wiped out easily if the market movs against you and you cannot manage your positions. Somehow I was expecting another downtime, because it’s still early technology. However, if Sol wants to become a serious player these outages are not acceptable. What’s your take on this? I am surprised that price stayed quite stable. Any thoughts?

it can't be a leading defi chain with liveness failures. they've been lucky so far that price has been fairly stable during these, but what if there's a big macro event at the same time? it would be bad.

it doesn't matter as much for other stuff like depin, payments (code still ran), nfts, etc, but the highest value in a blockchain is having a vibrant defi economy, and constant liveness failures definitely puts that at risk.

i am hopeful that with firedancer + other clients that eventually they will figure out a fallback method (eg. one client has bug, fallback to secondary to continue) but it's theoretical and a lot of nuance to how that would work. more client diversity is sorely needed.