Solana Faces Transaction Finality Risk Due to Routing Issue

Solana Faces Serious Transaction Finality Risk

On Wednesday, Solana encountered a critical issue when nearly 29% of staked SOL tokens went offline, approaching the 33.34% threshold necessary for transaction finalization. This incident was traced back to a routing misconfiguration at Teraswitch, a service provider, which disrupted operations across multiple locations including London and Tokyo.

The faulty routing led to a major autonomous system, AS20326, losing a significant percentage of its stake, with 94% of its tokens becoming inactive. This network alone held approximately 118 million SOL, highlighting the concentration of stakes that exposed the network to substantial risk.

During this outage, nearly 90 validators were affected, resulting in a combined loss of 333 SOL in rewards while engineers worked to rectify the routing problem, which was resolved within about ten minutes. Marinade Finance reported that a substantial number of validators, specifically 59 managing 80.2 million SOL, opted to stay offline rather than switch to alternative routes, which prolonged the disruption.

Potential Future Risks

Marinade also assessed the situation and identified a potential vulnerability in the network's stake management, as four autonomous systems control a significant majority of stakes. They indicated plans to reevaluate their limits on network allocations and improve communication regarding validator failover capabilities.

The 333 SOL lost during this event will be compensated through validator bonds at the end of the epoch. However, had the percentage of offline tokens surpassed the critical threshold, it could have led to a complete halt in transaction finalization, an event without any safety net for SOL holders. This incident comes on the heels of a previous major disruption in February 2024, which lasted nearly five hours.