Solana (SOL) came within five percentage points of a full network halt on Wednesday morning. One routing glitch at one hosting company knocked 28.83% of all staked SOL offline in minutes.

Almost nobody noticed. Staking platform Marinade Finance reconstructed the incident and found the network got 86% of the way to the 33.34% line where Solana stops finalizing transactions.

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How One Bad Route Nearly Halted the Solana Network

The fault began at Teraswitch, a hosting provider popular with Solana validators. A broken route left its Miami site, then spread through an internal relay in Amsterdam. Twelve sites from London to Tokyo lost their connection. North America never felt it.

“Solana got 86% of the way to a halt this morning and it barely registered anywhere,” Marinade Finance indicated.

Teraswitch found the bug in about 10 minutes. Full recovery took 33. At the peak, roughly 20 million SOL of online stake stood between the network and a freeze.

Around 90 validators went dark. Their combined lost rewards came to 333 SOL, about $25,600 at current prices. Validator bonds will cover that at the end of the epoch.

Solana’s Own Safety Cap Is Already Broken

An autonomous system number (ASN) is the block of internet addresses one network operator controls. One ASN, AS20326, hosts 27.34% of everything staked on Solana. During the fault, 94% of that stake went offline at once.

The Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP), which steers foundation stake to validators, caps any single ASN at 25%. That cap exists for exactly this failure. It is already broken.

Another 14 million SOL dropped in the same minutes on unrelated providers. Marinade could not explain the overlap. Provider labels clearly miss some shared points of failure.

Backup systems failed the test too. Of 74 validators Marinade measured, only three switched to a second site. The rest sat offline until the internet healed. Helius, Solana’s second-largest validator, stayed down all 33 minutes.

Marinade admitted its own numbers look similar, with four ASNs holding two-thirds of the stake it allocates. It now plans tighter caps per ASN and data center, and will publish which validators run automatic failover.

A Near Miss With a Long History

SOL trades near $76.46, up 0.6% on the day. The market shrugged. No user funds were ever at risk, and bonds cover the lost rewards. The worry is structural, not immediate.

Solana has seen this movie before. In November 2022, German host Hetzner kicked 1,000 validators offline and pushed delinquent stake past 20%. Wednesday’s fault went further.

The chain’s last full network halt, in February 2024, ended a 351-day uptime streak and took about five hours to fix. No bond covers that outcome. A halt freezes every SOL holder at once.

The timing stings. Validators are preparing the Alpenglow finality upgrade, due by October, which promises faster confirmations. Speed means little if one provider’s routing table can stall the whole chain.

The open question is whether stake spreads out before the next bad route finds it.

Source: BeInCrypto