Solana Delayed Due to Fault Linked to Some Cold Storage Operations

After four hours of outage, validators rebooted the network by blocking the so-called “durable nonce transactions” that have been popular among several exchanges.

Solana’s latest outage occurred on Wednesday when a flaw in the blockchain’s processing of a specific sort of transaction meant for offline use-cases knocked the network offline for more than four hours.

Solana Labs Communications Chief Austin Federa told CoinDesk that validators only began restarting the network after blocking these so-called “persistent nonce transactions.” They’ll be disabled until the devs figure out what caused Solana’s consensus process to go haywire and fix it.

Validators speculated that this could have repercussions for any offline custodian whose transactions fall under this category, possibly restricting their ability to move funds until the patch is applied. CoinDesk has started contacting exchanges to inquire about their Solana setup.

Even still, a few exchanges reported issues with Solana deposits and withdrawals as of publication time on Wednesday. Binance, Coinbase, and Crypto.com are three of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges.When the outage started at noon Eastern time on Wednesday, the chain’s native SOL token was already down about 13%, trading at $39.98, according to CoinMarketCap.

Long-term Nonces

Until recently, Federa said, durable nonces accounted for “an extraordinarily small percentage” of transactions on Solana. The technique is gaining traction across exchanges. A nonce is a random number that is used for a specific purpose in cryptography.

“This was likely a defect that existed for a long time but was never really an issue because it’s not something that most people use,” Federa said.

On Solana, durable nonces are meant for token holders with complicated offline signature setups who can’t always prepare their transactions quickly enough for the fast network.A custodian who signs Solana transactions using two space computers, for example, might not be able to complete the task in a single block. In this case, normal Solana transactions would fail. Nonces that last a long time offer the token holder time to work.

Solana’s ability to manage long-term nonces was tested on Wednesday. Instead of considering these specialty inbounds as a single transaction, Federa claims that the network’s validators double-counted them at two separate block heights. Solana’s consensus mechanism was effectively broken as a result of this impossible predicament.

Laine from Stakewiz, a Solana validator operator, stated the flaw was “known” and was corrected before Wednesday’s events in a tweet. They claimed that it “hadn’t been triggered in this way before.”

On Wednesday evening, important infrastructure pieces such as RPC nodes began to work again, gently bringing the network back to life.