Solana Blockchain issues continue to surface.

Solana has been facing more issues on its blockchain with multiple shutdowns in the past couple months and continues to get worse since it cannot keep its status to “normal” since around mid-May. Data showing blockchain uptime being a problem before and now another issue is called a clock drift which can occur from longer blockchain processing times causing issues to staking rewards and tracking time.

The problem would not cause any direct performance issues but that means the entire blockchain and including all decentralized applications will be off by 30 mins which could be the beginning of something worse if the blocks continue to get longer. A post at 3:34 UTC, the issue does not have any impact on network performance. Transactions on the network will, however, show timestamps that are different from “wall-clock time,” as the statement put it.

Constant downtime, lack of new projects rolling out on Solana and additional issues have caused the coin to lose 70% of its value in approximately 60 days. Solana current price is $42.59 with the market overall taking another hit this morning.

From the Solana blockchain explorer the information shows the slot time being around 746 milliseconds when the average time is around 400 milliseconds, showing in real-time the disparity in being one of the effects of the current slower slot times on Solana. Slot time refers to the time interval within which a validator can submit a block to the network.

While Solana is a proof-of-stake blockchain, the network also uses proof-of-history (PoH) as a consensus algorithm. PoH takes care of Solana’s timekeeping by enabling each node on the network to maintain an accurate record of time. Solana uses clusters, a collection of validators that are responsible for processing transactions on its blockchain. PoH allows for decentralized timekeeping across all the nodes in a cluster.

When slot times are slower, epochs become longer since there must be 432,000 slots in every epoch causing fewer epochs, meaning less overall Solana rewards being paid out. At the ideal 400ms slot time, there are 182 epochs per year with each epoch lasting between two and three days. As such, fewer epochs will mean a reduction in the earnings collected by delegators and validators on the network. Continuing to monitor the situation with how the Solana team will respond, really can decide the fate of this cryptocurrency in the incoming weeks.