Try Quests to earn cryptoSolana Bounty: Solana Outages
Q82. Solana experienced another outage on 6/1 where validators were forced to restart the network. The network experienced a similar problem back on 5/1. After the restart happens during these outages, how do users on the network generally respond? Does the price of SOL drop because users lose confidence in the network? Is there more swapping behavior and more stablecoin activity? What protocols seem to have more activity after these types of events that on the average day in the Solana ecosystem? Is there more fear from defi Solana users than NFT enjoyers?
Overview of Solana
Solana has gained interest in the NFT and DeFi ecosystems because to the fact that it is less expensive and quicker to utilize than ethereum. According to its website, this blockchain handles 50,000 transactions per second at an average cost of $0.00025 per transaction. Ethereum can only process around 13 transactions per second, and transaction costs are much higher than on Solana.
Solana suffered its second outage in a month!!!
Solana, one of the leading cryptocurrencies behind Bitcoin and Ethereum, declined by more over 12 percent on June 1, 2022, when its blockchain had its second breakdown in a month. Many hours have passed since the network's validators had processed new blocks. As a result, apps built on Solana's blockchain were deactivated. At 1 p.m. Eastern, the event was noted by the Twitter account Solana Status. In order to repair this most recent outage, validators were instructed to restart in line with this Twitter account, which later stated that the outage lasted for four and a half hours. Most recently, on May 1, Solana went down for many hours before being brought back up after a network reset of its validators.
An objective for this dashboard
- The purpose of this investigation is to determine how Solana's network users typically react following a restart during these interruptions.
- We investigate swapping behaviors in the Solana ecosystem by swappers and transaction volume
- Next, we evaluate stablecoin activities with respect to swappers and transaction volume.
- We eventually determine if defi Solana users are more fearful than NFT enthusiasts.
As demonstrated in the above chart, the daily number of unique users is constantly growing, whereas the daily SOL price is steadily reducing and shows a significant drop on May 12 due to the UST depegging problem. On the outage of 1 May 2022, it can be seen that the SOL price has reduced by 4.73 percent relative to the previous day. In addition, the number of unique users has dropped significantly. On the outage date of June 1, 2022, we see that the SOL price has fallen by 4.62 percent compared to the previous day, and we also observe a significant drop on this day. Interestingly, after the restart occurs during these outages, the number of unique users returns to a similar level to the number of unique users prior to these outages, indicating that Solana's users have never been concerned about these outages and are willing to resume using the system once it has been restored.
As seen in the above graph, daily transaction volume tends to be extremely volatile. On the outage that happened on 1 May 2022, we noticed that the ratio of failed to successful transactions two days before to this outage is high, and the amount of failed transactions accounts for around 50 percent of the total, which explains why this outage occurred. During the outage that occurred on 1 June 2022, we saw an extraordinarily large volume of both successful and unsuccessful transactions. However, once Solana's system is restored, the number of transactions returns to normal, indicating that users are willing to utilize the system once again.
The bar chart illustrates the daily number of swappers in each Solana DEX. It can be observed that the daily number of swappers for all DEXs is rising substantially, with the Orca platform exhibiting the most prominent tendency. Nonetheless, during the outages on May 1 and June 1, we notice a significant decline in the number of swappers across all DEXs. After Solana's system is restored, we find that the number of swappers on these DEXs has surged considerably. This finding confirms that users of all Solana DEXs do not worry about the occurrence of these outages.
Daily swap transactions on Solana's DEXs are as shown in the above bar chart. We can observe that the daily volume of swap transactions across all DEXs is rising, with Jupiter aggregator v2 having the highest volume. During the outages on 1 May and 1 June, the number of swap transactions across all DEXs reduces substantially. The number of swap transactions on these DEXs has considerably risen since the recovery of Solana's system. As we observed a decrease in the price of SOL in the preceding analysis, this result suggests that some users may attempt to purchase assets during the price decline, resulting in substantial swaps transactions after Solana's system has been restored.
As shown in the graph above, the number of daily stablecoin swappers on Solana's DEXs is depicted. It can be observed that the daily number of stablecoin exchangers is rising substantially, with the USDC token attracting the most exchangers. During the outages on May 1 and June 1, the number of swappers for both stablecoins decreased significantly. After Solana's system has been reestablished, the number of swappers on both stablecoins has significantly increased. This study demonstrates that stablecoin's swappers are not concerned about these interruptions.
The bar graph depicts the daily number of stablecoin swap transactions on Solana's DEXs. The daily volume of swap transactions on USDC and USDT seems to be increasing, with USDC having the greatest volume. The frequency of swap transactions between two stablecoins drops dramatically during the outages on May 1 and June 1. Since the restoration of Solana's system, the volume of swap transactions on these stablecoins has increased dramatically.
The above line graph compares Defi users against NFT users in the Solana ecosystem. It can be seen that both Defi and NFT users are on the rise, with Defi users rising significantly over the period of consideration. During the outages on 1 May and 1 June, the number of users on Solana's Defi and NFT decreases significantly. However, with the restoration of Solana's system, we noticed that the number of Defi users is expanding drastically while the number of NFT users is increasing steadily. Therefore, our research demonstrated that NFT users fear these outages more than Defi users.
On the Solana network, the line chart above shows the comparison between Defi and NFT transaction volume. Both Defi and NFT transaction volumes are increasing, with Defi transaction volume increasing considerably throughout the time period under study. We discovered that the number of transactions on Solana's Defi and NFT decreased dramatically during the outages on May 1st. Furthermore, we found that the number of transactions on Solana's NFT is substantially reducing, but the number of transactions on Solana's Defi is slightly declining, during the outages on June 1st. The volume of transactions on Defi and NFT has gradually grown since Solana's system was restored. Based on the results of the outages on June 1st, we can infer that NFT users are more fear about these outages than Defi users.
Conclusion
This dashboard evaluated the Solana outages on 1 May and 1 June in a variety of ways, which are detailed here:
- Users of Solana were slightly concerned about these outages and were eager to resume utilizing the system whenever it was restored.
- Users of all Solana DEXs were unconcerned about these outages occurring. Additionally, some users may seek to acquire assets during the price decrease, resulting in significant swaps trades when Solana's system is restored.
- In addition, we discovered that stablecoin swappers used USDC the most and were unworried about these outages.
- NFT users were more concerned about these outages than Defi users, taking into account the number of users and transactions.
What caused the outage?
Under some conditions, a failed durable nonce transaction might be performed twice due to a runtime error induced by the persistent nonce transactions feature. This resulted in nondeterminism when a validator reprocessed the transaction and some nodes refused the resulting block while others accepted it. Critically, more over 33 percent of validators approved the block, but this percentage fell short of the 66 percent threshold necessary to resolve the nondeterminism.
How are nonce transactions supposed to work, and how are they different from normal transactions?
Solana makes use of simultaneous processing of non-overlapping transactions to significantly increase throughput. Networks that execute transactions serially may use an incrementing nonce; however, Solana employs a different approach to prevent transactions from being handled twice. For regular transactions, which account for over 99.99 percent of all transactions on the Solana blockchain, the network uses a recent block hash and retains a record of executed transactions inside that window to prevent duplicates from being processed.
Due to the non-expiring nature of persistent nonce transactions, they need a distinct technique to avoid duplicate processing and are executed serially. These transactions use an account-specific on-chain value that is rotated each time a durable nonce transaction is completed. The identical persistent nonce transaction should not be able to be executed again once the value has rotated.
Solution
The durable nonce transaction functionality was removed in versions v1.9.28/v1.10.23 to avoid a network shutdown in the event that a similar circumstance arose again. Until the mitigation has been implemented and the functionality reactivated in a next version, durable nonce transactions will not be processed.
