Solana’s DeFi users mostly unbothered by network outage

Due to an apparent bug, Solana experienced five hours of downtime Tuesday morning.

Solana’s DeFi protocols have seen a surge in activity amid a raft of airdrops, but the bullishness was temporarily on hold as validators slowly moved to an upgraded version of the network. Still, the Discord channels where Solana DeFi users gather to chat mostly voiced commitment to the Solana ecosystem as the network went back online.

At the time of the last outage in February 2023, Solana’s decentralized finance protocols held roughly $260 million of total value locked (TVL), according to DeFiLlama. Today, that number stands at over $1.6 billion.

The value growth is partly due to Solana’s price appreciation over that time, but the story of the past couple months has been airdrops, where DeFi protocols have given active users newly-launched tokens for free — with distributions sometimes totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars-worth.

Users hoping for a slice of the airdrop pie helped bring Solana decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes to record highs in recent months.

The Discord channels for these DeFi protocols were alight soon after the Tuesday morning outage.

“Cat is looking anxiously at solana network now,” Meow, the pseudonymous feline-themed co-founder of the Jupiter DEX aggregator wrote as questions about the downtime began rolling in.

Jupiter began airdropping nearly $700 million-worth of its new JUP token to community members last week. Some users took the opportunity to dunk on Solana as inferior to the Ethereum network, but most stayed resolute despite the downtime.

“[Y]ou guys think you know about fud [fear, uncertainty and doubt] but you didn’t experience crypto and solana in 2021-2022 lmao,” one user wrote.

Some were quick to point out that no blockchain is perfect.

“Other chains also have outages in different ways, [layer-2s] halt very often, when ETH gas fees spike during a bull that’s also a form of being unusable. Sometimes bitcoin blocks take 1-2 hours which is also an outage in a different way,” a Jupiter user wrote.

Users on other protocols were similarly unperturbed. A user on the Discord for the Solana-based DEX Orca said the outage meant they were “getting a chance to touch some grass.”

Users of the Solana lending protocol MarginFi began anxiously posting the prices at which their positions would get liquidated as Solana’s price ticked lower during the outage.

Fortunately for Solana investors though, the market seemed to share the DeFi users’ blasé attitude towards the downtime.

After the network went back online, Solana’s (SOL) price climbed higher than it had been before the outage, trading for around $96.80 at press time.

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