Smart contract blockchain Solana nearly froze Wednesday, Marinade Finance says
Reported by CoinDesk · AI-assisted summary by ChikoCorp AI News Desk
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Summary
Solana nearly experienced a network freeze on Wednesday due to a routing failure at Teraswitch’s Miami data center that caused almost 29% of staked tokens to go offline, according to staking platform Marinade Finance. This incident brought the network close to its one-third staked token offline threshold, which would halt finalization of transactions and freeze the network. About 90 validators lost 333 SOL in rewards, but the issue was resolved in about 10 minutes.
Why it matters
The incident highlights the vulnerability of Solana’s network to outages caused by reliance on a single network operator, AS2032, which controlled over a quarter of all staked tokens—exceeding Solana’s safety limit. The potential freeze would have impacted all holders of SOL tokens, disrupting transaction finality on the network. Marinade emphasized that a full freeze would cause significant downtime, similar to the five-hour outage in February 2024.
Key context
Solana stops finalizing blockchain transactions if more than one-third of staked tokens become inactive simultaneously, a safety mechanism to maintain network integrity. Staking involves locking tokens to secure the network and earn rewards. The routing problem began at Teraswitch’s Miami facility and spread to data centers in Europe and Asia, while North American validators remained operational. Some validators’ backup systems failed to engage, prolonging their offline status.
Key numbers and entities
The data center provider involved was Teraswitch, with the key network operator identified as AS2032 controlling over 25% of staked tokens. Approximately 29% of tokens were offline temporarily, about 20 million tokens short of triggering a network halt. Ninety validators lost 333 SOL in rewards, and Solana has $4.3 billion in assets locked in DeFi protocols.
What remains unclear
The source does not flag open questions or uncertainties beyond the details provided, focusing mainly on the immediate technical failure and its short-term impacts.