SOL CRUSHING. It was supposed to be a cause for celebration: On Feb. 25, the Solana blockchain would complete a full 365 days without an outage – seen as a remarkable milestone given its historic jankiness. So notable it was, in fact, that analysts at Coinbase Institutional called it out in a report last week: “Solana is fast approaching its first full year mark without any downtime, showcasing its significant ecosystem progress, especially when compared to an early history of crashes that halted the chain for days at a time.” But the anniversary was not to be. On Tuesday, some 20 days shy of the mark, Solana went down for nearly five hours, in what one blockchain validator described as “performance degradation.” According to the website status.solana.com, “Core contributors are working on a root cause report, which will be made available once complete.” CoinDesk columnist Daniel Kuhn noted that even as Solana’s top developers, led by co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, promote the blockchain as a top contender in the race for relevance, they have continued to describe the project as being in “beta.” After Tuesday’s outage, such a descriptor might seem fitting. On the social-media platform X, fans of rival projects from Ethereum to Cardano and even Litecoin and VeChain were quick with the jabs. The prediction market Polymarket posted what appeared to be a betting forum on whether Solana would “go down again in February,” with 89 cents on “no” and 11 cents on “yes.”
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