The deep freeze in the Solana network continued on Saturday, as validators prepared a second restart attempt they hoped would restore service for users of the blockchain.
Validators who manage Solana’s infrastructure decided that the best way of repairing the chain was to synchronize restarts and fork them. The first attempt at restarting was abandoned by validators who realized that they had chosen the wrong point to restart. This further prolonged the delay.
CoinDesk was told by developers and validators that the problems began as slow transaction processing. Block production on the chain has stopped and transactions are not being processed or validated.
It means that users of the chain can’t. Users of the chain have their crypto assets on-chain frozen until the critical backend infrastructure is restored online.
Even hours after the crisis, key Solana ecosystem voices were still trying to find a suspect. One theory is that the blockchain was hacked by a “fat block”. Not surprisingly, the network was already moving to an improved version just before it began experiencing problems.
As of press time, validators were working with Solana Labs developers to try and restart the chain. They had about 70% of the total stake. To proceed, the network requires an 80% supermajority.