A Major Altcoin Narrowly Avoided Disaster Today

The Solana network came remarkably close to a transaction finality halt today after a routing error took numerous validators offline simultaneously.

According to data shared by Marinade Finance, at the peak of the event, 28.83% of staked $SOL entered a “non-transactional” state. The critical threshold for transaction finality on Solana is 33.34%. Thus, the network reached a point where it could have experienced a loss of “finality” if approximately 19.9 million more $SOL had been deactivated.

According to Marinade Finance’s post-event analysis, the network came within approximately 86% of the threshold where finality would stop. Block production continued during the event, which affected around 90 validators, and Solana did not completely halt. However, if the active staking rate had dropped below 66.67%, the finalization of new blocks, meaning they would have become irreversible, would have stopped.

Therefore, the event is significant not so much as a classic shutdown of the entire Solana network, but rather as the network approaching a critical state known as a “finality halt.” Marinade calculated that the total staking rewards missed by the 90 affected validators amounted to approximately 333 $SOL. The outage lasted about 33 minutes for some operators.

The Source of the Problem in Solana Was a Routing Error in Teraswitch

The incident was attributed to a network routing problem in the Teraswitch infrastructure. According to the shared technical analysis, a default route originating from the company’s Miami facility was announced without the necessary specifications. A route reflector in Amsterdam then distributed this route to other facilities in Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions.

As a result, some edge routers preferred the erroneous route as the local default route, while the underlying core network considered the route invalid. Valid traffic routing paths were reported lost in a total of 12 locations, including London, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo. North American infrastructure was largely unaffected.

The problem was identified within approximately 10 minutes, but it took about 33 minutes for some validators to return to full normal operation.

Marinade’s analysis also raised concerns about the risk of overcrowding in Solana’s verification infrastructure.

According to shared data, there are approximately 118.89 million staked $SOL on autonomous system number AS20326. This amount represents more than a quarter of the total stake in Solana, while it was reported that approximately 94 percent of this stake was simultaneously offline during the incident.

The effects of the problem were not limited to this. Marinade noted that at the same time, approximately 14.1 million $SOL worth of stakes running on other platforms such as Latitude.sh, Limestone, Butterfly Research, and Allnodes were also offline.

The company stated that it was not possible to determine from the available data whether the simultaneous impact on these validators stemmed from a shared infrastructure dependency or was coincidental. However, the incident indicated that concentration measurements based solely on the hosting provider might underestimate the true correlation risk.

*This is not investment advice.