Solana’s Fall Explained: What Investors Missed

The recent outage of the Solana network has sparked intense discussion within the cryptocurrency community.

Ari Paul, a well-known figure in the crypto space, has weighed in on the incident, arguing that the negative market reaction to Solana’s technical issues might reflect a nuanced understanding of risk among investors rather than a straightforward sign of market maturation.

Solana, which is praised for its speed and efficiency as a potential rival to Ethereum, faced a significant setback when its mainnet experienced downtime. This raised questions about the stability and security of blockchain networks.

Market reaction and expectations

Historically, the crypto market has shown varied responses to network vulnerabilities, with incidents like the 51% attacks on Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin SV and Ethereum Classic between 2018 and 2020 not significantly shaking investor confidence.

However, the reaction to Solana’s recent outage indicates a change. According to Paul, this is not necessarily a marker of the market’s maturity but rather an evolution in what investors have come to expect and price into their investments.

Bitcoin investors place a premium on network uptime and security, but Solana’s investors, aware of its historical issues, may have already accounted for such risks.

Hence, SOL saw a minor price drop, while Bitcoin would likely have experienced a severe price crash. Meanwhile, altcoins like ETH were unfazed by 51% because they were likely priced in by investors.

Another Solana outage

The technical difficulties faced by Solana on Feb. 6 were described as a “major outage,” with the mainnet experiencing performance degradation that halted block progression.

This event prompted a swift response from Solana’s engineers and validators.

Despite efforts to mitigate the impact, the SOL token’s value dropped by more than 3%.

The Solana mainnet has now been down for hours.

Source