Solana Proves Robust As Market Crash Brings Major Banking Giants Down

Solana remains robust during the recent market crash, outperforming major TradFi platforms despite its history of outages.

• TradFi platforms face downtime during a major market crash but Solana network is resilient despite past issues. 
• Solana had to battle with wild swings in transactions before. 

The recent market crash, which saw Bitcoin drop below $50,000, has created a frenzy of activity in both crypto markets and traditional financial (tradFi) institutions. 

Times like these test the reliability of both blockchain networks and traditional web infrastructure. This time, blockchain networks fared better.

Despite experiencing its share of technical issues in the past, with several network-level outages in the past years, Solana showed robust performance during the recent crash. At the same time, major banks like Schwab and Fidelity saw their services crash. 

Market Crash Disrupts TradFi 

Major financial panic sent the markets in disarray. On Monday, August 5, a major sell-off in Japan saw the Nikkei index drop 20% from its all-time high on July 11. The crypto market reacted similarly, shedding 18% of its overall market cap, with Bitcoin dropping to $50,000. 

The drop in asset prices also resulted in a surge in trading activity, both in crypto and stock markets, as traders scrambled to cover their positions or to sell before others did. 

The influx of activity proved too much for major TradFi platforms like Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments, Citi, Robinhood, and others, which all experienced downtime in their online services. 

BREAKING: At least SIX trading platforms are down:

• Citi
• Fidelity
• E-Trade
• Vanguard
• TD Ameritrade
• Charles Schwab pic.twitter.com/FESJrgfeuf

— Radar (@RadarHits) August 5, 2024

At the same time, major blockchain networks, including Solana, remained robust despite the sudden increase in trading volume. This is especially notable because Solana experienced several outages in the past. 

Solana Stays Robust, Despite Past Issues

Solana has faced several significant outages in recent years, impacting its reliability. Notable incidents include a February 2024 outage caused by a bug in the Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache, which led to an infinite loop and halted network operations for nearly five hours. 

In October 2022, a misconfigured node created issues for Solana’s consensus mechanism, causing another prolonged downtime​. Similarly, a surge in transaction volume during a DeFi protocol launch in September 2021 overwhelmed the network, leading to a 17-hour outage. 

Underlying these issues is the large increase in network traffic, caused by spam and bot transactions, memecoin trading, and DeFi applications, which are not an issue for tradFi. 

This continued pressure on the network made the Solana team implement numerous upgrades that made the network more resistant. Conversely, this has made it more resilient in cases of market panics, compared to tradFi platforms. 

Over the past year, Solana has achieved a 99.94% uptime, showcasing its enhanced reliability.

As Solana continues to grow, it will encounter the limits of its scalability once again, unless it does ongoing improvements. 

The robustness of trading platforms is crucial to maintaining fairness in the financial markets. When these are down, that lack of access harms retail investors the most.