Solana, one of the largest blockchains, was impacted by a "network instability" incident that disrupted transactions last week.
This is the fourth incident in just a few months that clogged the network.
The latest incident occurred in the midst of the cryptocurrency crash that has wiped out almost $1.3 trillion in market value from its November high, according to CoinGecko.
The platform's native currency, SOL, has lost more than 64% of its value since its Nov. 6 all-time high.
Solana explained that it experienced "high levels of network congestion."
"The current issue experienced by validators is due to excessive duplicate transactions. Engineers have just released 1.8.14, which will attempt to mitigate the worst effects of this issue. These forthcoming releases are aimed at improving the state of the network, with more improvements expected to roll out in the next 8-12 weeks," said the platform in a notice on its website dated January 22.
Validators use their computing power to help verify the network.
Fight For Supremacy
"With the adoption of 1.8.14 the incident has been resolved," says an update on Jan. 23.
The Solana blockchain, which is often touted as a competitor to Ethereum, has been affected in recent months by various incidents, which add to the problems that all blockchains should encounter as scaling issues are common for many blockchain platforms.
The network went down on Jan. 4 for many hours.
Solana, a native third-generation blockchain -- bitcoin being the first-generation and ethereum being the second -- is viewed as ‘Ethereum Killer’ by the crypto community. That means it's among currencies that are decentralized, secure, enable smart contracts, offer a DApps (decentralized apps) platform, scale well for fast transactions at low cost and can work with other blockchains.
Solana is fighting Cardano and Polkadot for supremacy.
"Since its launch in March 2020, Solana has seen significant adoption with more than 50 billions transactions settled, $11bn+ in total value locked (TVL), and 5.7mn+ NFTs minted. Its ability to provide high throughput, low cost and ease of use creates a blockchain optimized for consumer use cases like micropayments, DeFi, NFTs, decentralized networks (Web3) and gaming," Bank of America's analyst Alkesh Shah wrote in a recent research note.
Adding: "Solana could become the Visa of the digital asset ecosystem."
