Solana Bulls Bounce Back from Network Outage, Mounts Vigor For New SOL High

Solana has demonstrated remarkable resilience following the recent network outage, with SOL reclaiming its position above the $100 mark and surpassing Bitcoin in performance this week.

The recovery comes after a minor dip to $92.91 on Tuesday during a major network disruption lasting approximately 4 hours and 46 minutes, marking the first outage since early 2023.

According to a report from Solana Status, block production on Solana’s mainnet beta resumed at 14:57 UTC on Wednesday, following a successful upgrade to version 1.17.20 and a restart of the cluster by validator operators.

In a detailed blog by the WU Blockchain team, journalist Colin Wu highlighted the challenges faced by Solana, particularly its periodic crashes due to transaction volume overload.

“Looking back at historical network events, we will find that the emergence of a large number of transactions is the main reason for the historical network disruption, which may be related to Solana’s mechanism,” wrote Wu, quoting Hu Zhiwei, president of the Boundary Intelligence Research Institute.

Wu further recommended several key areas to enhance Solana’s resilience, including improving infrastructure, optimizing the consensus mechanism, enhancing software robustness, and refining validator incentivization.

Notably, this outage adds to a series of historical network failures experienced by Solana, including incidents in May 2021, September 2021, January 2022, and February 2023, among others.

Nevertheless, despite these setbacks, sentiment surrounding Solana remains positive, with some viewing the recent outage as a potential blessing in disguise. On Thursday, popular on-chain analytics platform Santiment emphasized how Solana has outperformed Bitcoin this week, with its price surging above $110 and experiencing a 21.5% increase against Bitcoin’s 16.91 in the past 36 hours. 

The firm further noted that the outage that initially caused concern among traders “ended up being a local bottom, with the FUD fueling this price rebound.”

Furthermore, the firm highlighted how development activity on the Solana platform has been on the rise, indicating ongoing efforts to address network scalability and stability issues.

That said, SOL is projected to keep soaring, with the price recently having bounced off yearly support around $80. Presently, price faces a minor resistance at $120. Should the price breach and hold above this ceiling, the next target is the December 2023 high of $125 and then $150.

At press time, SOL was trading at $113.95, up 21.10% in 24 hours, with trading volume surging by 91.53% to $2.8 billion. Notably, between October 15 and December 25, 2023, SOL gained about 460%, making it one of the largest gainers among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.