SOL Stumbles as Solana Struggles with Technical Issues

Solana’s SOL token down nearly 8% as Solana Mainnet creaks under a high transaction load

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key takeaways

  • Solana engineers say network bug caused forking to begin when transaction load hit 400,000 TPS
  • Engineers were unable to immediately resolve the problem, which led to transactions not processing to blocks on the Solana blockchain. Instead, the validator community elected to do a restart of the network

Solana is down nearly 8% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko, as the Alameda Research backed protocol experienced its first major growing pain. 

According to various Solana block explorers like SolanaBeach, the majority of transactions that were attempted onto the blockchain have failed. Data shows that while there were intermittent issues as early as a week ago, for the last eight hours that failure is now widespread and barely any transactions can be successfully written to the blockchain. 

“Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking,” the Solana Foundation said in a statement on their twitter account. “This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline. Engineers across the ecosystem attempted to stabilize the network, but were unsuccessful.”

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The Foundation said that the validator community had decided to commence a restart of the network, and instructions on the restart would be posted to its Discord server shortly. 

Georgios Konstantopoulos, a research partner at VC fund Paradigm, speculated on Twitter that part of the issue came from a network of bugs spamming the network to exploit a bug that would reduce transaction fees. 

Others on Twitter were skeptical that the protocol, which launched earlier this year, would be able to handle institutional grade traffic should it crumble at this point of limited use. The Solana blockchain was home to this summer’s hottest NFT trend, the Degenerate Ape Academy with one going for $1.1 million earlier this month

Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko was undeterred on Twitter, inviting Solana validators to get on the blockchain’s Discord to discuss the next steps. 

“It’s beta time,” he said, acknowledging the software wasn’t in a perfect state and there was some work to be done. 

SOL is currently trading for $153.76, down 8% on-day.

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Research

The Solana validator landscape has changed drastically over the past year. The chain now has 1,332 active validators with 380.9 million SOL staked (63.9% of supply) as of February 2025. Validator revenue had diversified beyond inflationary rewards (still making up 55%) to include Jito tips (30%), priority fees (24%), and base fees (<1%), in January, especially with the increased activity on Solana. Since then, issuance has become dominant again (76%), while Jito tips (14%), priority fees (9%), and base fees (less than 1%) have reduced in share of February 2025. There has been a strong shift towards non-inflationary revenue sources, which have become more central to validator economics as priority fees and off-chain blockspace auctions gain traction. Client diversity has also improved drastically, with implementations such as Agave, Jito-Solana, and Frankendancer already in use, and upcoming clients like Firedancer and Sig expected to further strengthen resilience and reduce reliance on a single codebase.

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