Tag: Solana Blockchain

Solana Launches Real-Time Carbon Emissions Tracking Dashboard

by Blockchain News

The Solana Foundation has launched a real-time tracking dashboard to measure carbon emissions on its blockchain. The foundation collaborated with data platform Trycarbonara to create the dashboard, which is the first “major smart-contract blockchain” to measure carbon emissions in real-time. This marks an important step towards promoting transparency and accountability in the blockchain industry.

The new dashboard can be found on the Solana Climate website and displays the total node count, megawatt-hours, total carbon emissions average, and marginal use, alongside numerous other indicators. Furthermore, it contains several emissions comparison charts where users can view side-by-side conversions depicting Solana usage versus numerous other emission-producing activities.

According to a blog post from the foundation, the organization hopes that this initiative will set a new standard for measuring emissions in blockchain by publishing this data. The data used to power the Solana Foundation’s real-time carbon emissions dashboard is available open-source and is modeled on the estimated carbon footprint of the Dell PowerEdge R940.

It remains to be seen whether other blockchain outfits will adopt similar tracking systems, but this move from the Solana Foundation comes amid increasing global efforts to utilize blockchain technology to monitor carbon emissions around the world.

As part of its “Shaping Europe’s digital future” initiative, the European Commission has praised blockchain’s ability to serve as a foundation for the accurate measurement of carbon emissions in any sector. In an article on the EU’s digital strategy blog, the commission wrote, “Blockchain can be utilised through smart contracts to better calculate, track and report on the reduction of the carbon footprint across the entire value chain.”

This move towards using blockchain to track carbon emissions is particularly relevant given the global climate crisis and increasing demand for more sustainable and eco-friendly practices.

In the United States, President Joe Biden recently floated budget plans that would add an excise on electricity used for cryptocurrency mining in the amount of 30%. This shows that the government is also taking steps towards addressing the energy consumption concerns of the cryptocurrency industry.

Overall, the Solana Foundation’s real-time carbon emissions tracking dashboard is a positive step towards promoting transparency and accountability in the blockchain industry. As more blockchain outfits follow suit, the industry will become more eco-friendly, which is crucial for achieving a sustainable future.

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Solana Restores Network Outage After Successful Cluster Restart, But SOL Price Still Struggling

by Blockchain News

Solana, a decentralized blockchain built to enable scalable, user-friendly apps, announced on Saturday that its network is back online following an outage on Friday night caused by a misconfigured node that stopped the blockchain from processing transactions.

A single misconfigured node took down the entire network – the glitch caused the outage for several hours. Solana informed its users about the blackout but raised confidence that its developers were on site working to diagnose and fix the problem.

A validator appeared running a duplicate validator instance, which caused the blockchain to fork because validators couldn’t agree on which one was correct.

The fork caused an obscure code path that left validators unable to switch back to the main fork. The software and blockchain company Stakewiz, which operates a validator node on Solana, explained the matter online via Twitter social media. Stakewiz suggested the Solana network’s failure to rectify the situation was due to a failed node failover setup.

After working to fix the blackout, the Solana developers made a decision to restart the network. The team said they performed the necessary restart of Mainnet Beta at 8 a.m. London time. The restart rebooted the network, and Solana then said “validators are operating successfully now. Network operators and dapps will continue to restore client services for the next several hours.”

Although Solana has been describing itself as a high-performance blockchain, the network has recently suffered a series of multiple outages. In September last year, the network went offline for nearly 18 hours.

In January this year, Solana witnessed a major blackout that lasted as long as 18 hours, the incident prompted anger from frustrated traders who watched their portfolio values plunge while unable to offload tokens. In early May, the network froze for about seven hours until validators restarted. In June, the network support structure suffered an outage of more than four hours.

Due to the latest network outage, the Solana token prices are down by 6.25% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. At the time of writing, Solana’s (SOL) price is trading at $32.93 per coin. SOL dropped by 2.12% in the past 7 days and is down 87.33% below its all-time high.

Image source: Shutterstock

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Solana hit with another network incident causing degraded performance

by Cointelegraph

The Solana blockchain has suffered a third incident in just a few months that clogged the network and caused transactions to fail, with users debating whether it was caused by another DDos attack or if it was just network issues.

The scale and nature of the incident is hard to ascertain, with Coinbase, Wu Blockchain and Redditors reporting there had been an incident causing the network to slow and transactions to fail. However Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko denied there had been a DDoS on this occasion.

The latest incident comes less than a month after a previous attack which saw reports the network was clogged with mass botting due to another Initial DEX offering (IDO) on Solana-based decentralized exchange platform Radium.

According to Wu Blockchain, the Solana network went down for around four hours in the early morning of Jan. 4 UTC time as a result of an apparent DDoS attack. Solana.Status shows the network has been fully operational with 100% uptime over that period.

A post on the r/CryptoCurrency group on Reddit yesterday also shared several screenshots of Solana (SOL) users reporting issues with failed SOL transactions around the time of the potential DDoS and network downtime. Coinbase also provided an incident report over the past 24 hours on the Solana network’s “degraded performance” that resulted in failed withdrawals of SOL on the crypto exchange.

“This is why you don’t use a service’s own status page to come to conclusions especially if it masquerades as a decentralized blockchain, but in reality is just a glorified database,” user u/Set1Less wrote.

But other users responding to the r/CryptoCurrency post in the r/Solana community questioned the validity of the claims, with “NiftyMufti” stating that:

“So instead of echoing random people’s opinions, why don’t you show the charts? A DDoS attack and downtime would have shown in the block explorers. I see no such signs. Prove me wrong. Which hours in which timezone was this supposed to have taken place?”

Solana Labs co-founder Yakovenko echoed as such on Twitter earlier today, noting that the network issues weren’t related to a DDoS, and were just the “pain of getting a new runtime commercialized.”

In a separate Twitter thread, Yakovenko also stated that the “cost model for compute is still a [little] wonky, real fix to deal with this is in 1.9, where TXs have to specify all the resources they use upfront.”

Related: Top crypto winners and losers of 2021

In an interview with Cointelegraph on Dec. 22, Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana Labs said that developers are currently working to address the network’s issues, specifically in relation to improving transaction metering.

“Solana’s runtime is a new design. It doesn’t use EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] and a ton of innovation was done to ensure that users have the cheapest fees possible, but there’s still work to be done on the runtime,” he said.