It's DeFi season and things got a little too hot to handle for Solana and Arbitrum One as transaction volumes ballooned

• The Solana blockchain network was down for hours after seeing 400,000 transactions per second.
• The system has since been rebooted but it’s gonna be a while before applications and other systems based on Solana are back to full functionality.
• A surge in transactions caused the Ethereum-backed Arbitrum One network’s sequencer to go offline for 45 minutes.
• Meanwhile, hackers were trying to breach the Ethereum blockchain — albeit, unsuccessfully.

Decentralised finance (DeFi) projects are pumping hard — a little too hard for some to handle, like Solana and Ethereum-backed Arbitrum One.


Both of these blockchain networks were missing in action for a bit during the last 24 hours, apparently due to a surge in transaction volumes. Simply put, there were too many people on the network for them to handle. It doesn’t help that DeFi projects are now the leading target for hackers around the world in the crypto space.

And, while Solana and Arbitrum One were dealing with technical issues, the Ethereum blockchain was fending itself from an attack.

Things got a little too hot to handle for Solana

Solana, also dubbed the next ‘Ethereum-killer’ by those in the crypto community, saw transactions balloon to 400,000 per second. The surge, in turn, caused some nodes to go offline for hours.


As of noon Indian Standard Time (IST), the main network has been rebooted — after developers had to ask validators, the ones who verify transactions, to upgrade — but it may be a while before the applications and other supporting systems reach full functionality again.


Solana’s price took an initial hit of 15% due to the denial-of-service issues, and the price is yet to recuperate to its former glory. However, the dip is dwarfed in comparison to the over 400% uptick Solana saw in the month of August.

Arbitrum One expects more down time in the future

Arbitrum One, an ecosystem built on the Ethereum blockchain which boasts of low transaction fees, was down for nearly an hour after its sequencer was pulled offline. “Funds were never at risk, but the submission of new transactions stopped during the downtime,” Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitum One, in a statement acknowledging the outage.

As with Solana, the company noted that the root cause of the downtime was a bug causing the sequencer to get stuck when it received a very large burst of transactions in a short period of time. “The issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed,” said the firm.

To be fair, Arbitrum One is less than a month old and still in testing. It only opened up to the public on August 31 after raising $120 million in its Series B round of funding. Which is why the developers behind the ecosystem have warned that September 15’s outage could be the first of many.


According to Offchain Labs, the sequencer behind pulling offline doesn’t mean that the blockchain was not operational, even if it was glitchy for a bit. “Arbitrum users have the ability to bypass the Sequencer and submit their transactions directly to Ethereum for delayed inclusion in the Arbitrum chain, and this ability was fully preserved during today’s event.” it said.

Ethereum remains the knight in shining armour

The attempt to breach the Ethereum blockchain only affected a small number of nodes, according to developer Marius van der Wijden, who flagged the incident. All the affected nodes have since been corrected.


DeFi apps have surged during the pandemic — the most notable of which was the $610 million stolen from the Poly Network last month by ‘Mr White Hat’.

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