It’s been a cloudy day for Solana. The layer 1 smart-contract blockchain and Ethereum rival has suffered an embarrassing network-clogging issue, completely stalling the protocol for several hours.

The project’s official Twitter account initially tweeted that the mainnet-beta network was “experiencing intermittent instability” due to “resource exhaustion”.

At the time of writing, the Solana network was still down – and the issue began about eight hours ago.

 Solana node operators have reportedly been frantically trying to patch the problem for much of the day. However, according to Solana Status tweets, it looks as if those attempts have been unsuccessful.

What’s next, then? Apparently a complete restart of the network.

Unsurprisingly, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has been spending much of his day tweeting about the issue, aiming to inform and keep things things in perspective.

As reported by Decrypt, he told a user that the issue actually stemmed from a deluge of transaction volume from bots during an initial decentralised exchange offering (IDO) for a new project.

That project appears to be Grape Protocol – a “toolkit for decentralised social networking on Solana” – which was conducting its IDO token sale today on the Raydium decentralised exchange (DEX).

At press time, then, the state of play is this: the Solana validator community has elected to coordinate a restart of the network and is in the process of preparing a new release.

 

SEC vs Coinbase: Gary Gensler and Elizabeth Warren team up

US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler today suggested that crypto exchange Coinbase lists “dozens of tokens that might be securities” and that it might be breaking the law.

The SEC boss was speaking at a Senate Banking Committee hearing and fielding questions from noted crypto sceptic Senator Elizabeth Warren in what seemed like a stiff, rehearsed conversation.

You can watch it here, if you like. Warning, though, “air quotes” are used to describe DeFi.

Warren used the hearing with Gensler to highlight the dangers of crypto investing, mentioning last week’s market dump on September 7 and Coinbase’s network failure during it, potentially leaving investors stranded.

“We hear a lot about how crypto is all about financial inclusion,” said Warren to Gensler. “I want to test out with you if crypto is an improvement over the financial system.

“In a matter of hours, $400 billion in market value just disappeared,” she continued, referring to last week’s crash. She then used a fictional retail investor spending his “last $100” to illustrate the risks of crypto investing.

In Warren’s story, this made-up investor (we’ll call him Jimmy McApe) spent his money on something Warren dubbed “New Coin” for the purposes of the narrative.

But poor Jimmy was left out in the cold and unable to sell due to Coinbase being temporarily down. Thus he ended up losing all his money.

Warren set ’em up and Gensler knocked ’em down, making his point that Coinbase does not have a licence to operate as a stock exchange, yet might be offering securities to its customer base, and therefore might be acting illegally.

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