Solana’s Surprising Surge: Cracking the FUD Code

Solana made a stunning comeback after the outage threatened to derail the token’s forward momentum. SOL has emerged as one of the selected altcoins that have trounced Bitcoin in performance this week. Trailing above the $102 mark, the value of Solana has surged by 4.5% compared to Bitcoin in the past 36 hours. The near-five-hour downtime raised worries of a potential price decline, which ultimately turned out to be a temporary low point. Surprisingly, against market expectations, fear, uncertainty, and doubt [FUD] played a role as a catalyst in driving the subsequent price rebound.

After suffering the first outage of 2024, experts highlighted that the BPF [Berkley Packet Filter] loader, which is responsible for deploying, upgrading, and executing programs on Solana, has crashed. There was also speculation of foul play that disrupted consensus. Although the bug was identified and the BPF code lines were rewritten, it was not implemented until then.

The community should be advised on what caused the outage [the BPF Loader bug explanation is inadequate as the chain was working fine pre-v1.17.20]. There is speculation of foul play that disrupted consensus… A post-mortem is needed to put all those questions to rest.

To restore the network, Matthew Sigel, CEO of digital asset research at VanEck, proposed that the core software everyone runs be patched. However, some users criticized the lack of information from the official handle and urged Solana Labs to release a post-mortem for the February 6th outage event.

Later, Solana engineers resumed block production on mainnet beta following a successful upgrade to v1.17.20 and a restart of the cluster by validator operators. Core contributors are working on a root cause report, which will be made available once complete.

Solana’s Web3 Drive

Meanwhile, Solana Labs has officially launched its GameShift toolkit, designed to streamline the integration of blockchain functionality into video games. The announcement follows the toolkit’s beta release in October, and the full public version introduces noteworthy features, including support for in-game Tensor marketplaces and compatibility with various NFT collections.

Simultaneously, it has allied with the Abu Dhabi Global Market [ADGM]. The collaboration aims to improve distributed ledger technology solutions and push forward blockchain innovation, a press release said.

Lipika Deka: Lipika is a crypto-journalist at TWJ. A graduate in economics and finance, she has a keen interest in the political and socio-economic facets of blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency industry.