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{"actor":"system:backfill","investigation_id":"37f76c43-1a2b-430c-bcec-29da838671b3","kind":"publish","page_slug":"solana","published_at":"2026-05-30T13:02:41.431Z","sequence_num":3,"snapshot":{"content_type":"investigation","entity_name":"Solana","sections":[{"content":"<cite index=\"11-1,11-19\">Over the past five years, Solana has experienced seven separate outage incidents, five of which were caused by client bugs and two by the network's inability to handle floods of transaction spam.</cite> <cite index=\"8-31,8-33\">On 14 September 2021, the Solana blockchain went offline after a surge of transactions caused the network to fork, and different validators had different views of the state of the network. The outage lasted a total of about 17 hours.</cite> <cite index=\"5-12,5-13\">In October 2022, Solana experienced one of its most severe protocol-level failures, a consensus bug that brought the network to a standstill for over six hours. The issue stemmed from a validator producing multiple conflicting blocks, creating a fork that prevented the rest of the network from reaching agreement.</cite> <cite index=\"17-1,17-2\">It has been 262 days — over 37 weeks or more than 6,000 hours — since Solana last suffered a major outage. According to the network's own incident history tracker, the last major outage occurred on February 6 this year and lasted five hours.</cite> <cite index=\"2-1,2-32\">According to Anza, a flaw in how some messages were handled could cause validators to crash under certain conditions, and a coordinated exploit that took enough stake offline could have reduced cluster availability.</cite>","heading":"Network Stability Issues","severity":"high","sources":[{"credibility":2,"name":"A Complete History of Solana Outages: Causes and Fixes","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.helius.dev/blog/solana-outages-complete-history"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Solana (blockchain platform) - Wikipedia","type":"official","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Terrifying Solana flaw just exposed","type":"news_article","url":"https://cryptoslate.com/terrifying-solana-flaw-just-exposed-how-easily-the-always-on-network-could-have-been-stalled-by-hackers/"}]},{"content":"<cite index=\"31-1,31-2\">Solidus Labs reveals that 98.6% of tokens launched on Solana's Pump.fun and 93% of pools on Raydium exhibited signs of fraudulent activity. Researchers analyzed over 7 million tokens on Pump.fun between January 2024 and March 2025, finding that fewer than 100,000 maintained liquidity above $1,000.</cite> <cite index=\"33-2,33-14\">According to CoinDesk, Solana-based rug pulls resulted in the loss of around $500 million in 2024 alone.</cite> <cite index=\"34-16\">A staggering 98.6% of tokens on Pump.fun collapse into worthless pump-and-dump schemes shortly after launch, highlighting the extreme risk traders face without proper monitoring.</cite> <cite index=\"31-6\">Median losses per incident totaled $2,832, with one case exceeding $1.9 million.</cite> <cite index=\"10-1,10-2\">The meme coin contamination has made Solana toxic to compliance departments. How can an institution explain to regulators why they're operating on a network where 99% of activity is obvious securities fraud?</cite>","heading":"Meme Coin Scam Epidemic","severity":"critical","sources":[{"credibility":2,"name":"Report Exposes 98.6% of Solana Meme Coins on Pump.fun as Fraudulent","type":"news_article","url":"https://news.bitcoin.com/report-exposes-98-6-of-solana-meme-coins-on-pump-fun-as-fraudulent/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Pump.Fun Lawsuit Faces XMAS Twist","type":"news_article","url":"https://99bitcoins.com/news/altcoins/pump-fun-lawsuit-alleges-5000-message-plot-to-rig-solana-meme-coins/"},{"credibility":3,"name":"Why Solana Has Become Crypto's Biggest Disappointment","type":"other","url":"https://medium.com/@hermosillo.jessie/why-solana-has-become-cryptos-biggest-disappointment-ad6e8a4e59f0"}]},{"content":"<cite index=\"24-14,24-15,24-16\">In November 2022, the price of SOL token dropped by 40 percent in one day following the bankruptcy of FTX, due to sell off from Alameda Research. SOL tokens were Alameda's second-largest holding at the time and FTX held $982 million in SOL tokens. By the end of 2022, Solana had lost more than $50 billion in market capitalization since the beginning of the year.</cite> <cite index=\"25-9,25-10\">Solana did not experience direct outages due to FTX's collapse, but the platform did encounter ecosystem issues as FTX-aligned projects like Serum faced immediate fallout. Serum had critical infrastructure controlled by FTX; which raised significant security concerns within Solana's ecosystem.</cite> <cite index=\"29-7,29-8\">Following the $477 million hack of FTX, there were worries that the private keys to Solana-based decentralized exchange Serum had been compromised. Rather than being controlled by the exchange's DAO, the keys were held by FTX, leading to a hasty redeployment of a fork of the protocol, now controlled by \"a multi-sig controlled by a team of trusted developers\".</cite>","heading":"FTX Collapse Impact","severity":"high","sources":[{"credibility":2,"name":"Solana (blockchain platform) - Wikipedia","type":"official","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Solana's close ties to FTX cause financial and structural damage","type":"news_article","url":"https://protos.com/solanas-close-ties-to-ftx-cause-financial-and-structural-damage/"}]},{"content":"<cite index=\"8-3,8-4,8-6,8-7\">In June 2023, the SEC sued Coinbase, alleging that Solana and twelve other currencies offered by the platform failed the Howey Test and qualified as securities. The suit accused Coinbase of illegally evading requirements for disclosure by offering these tokens. Solana Foundation has denied that the token is a security. The price of SOL token dropped nearly 30% after this announcement from the SEC, This caused some exchanges to liquidate their holdings, including Robinhood which delisted SOL and other tokens named by the SEC.</cite> <cite index=\"7-7,7-8,7-9\">California resident Mark Young alleges key players in the Solana ecosystem misled investors and sold them unregistered securities. The plaintiff, Mark Young, filed the suit on July 1 against Solana Labs, Solana Foundation, Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, crypto investment firm Multicoin Capital and its co-founder Kyle Samani, as well as trading platform FalconX.</cite> <cite index=\"7-18,7-19\">As of May 2021, insiders held 48% of the SOL supply. The network is thus highly centralized.</cite>","heading":"Regulatory and Legal Issues","severity":"high","sources":[{"credibility":2,"name":"Solana (blockchain platform) - Wikipedia","type":"official","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Solana Investor Sues Project Insiders, Claims Network Is 'Highly Centralized'","type":"news_article","url":"https://blockworks.co/news/solana-investor-sues-project-insiders-claims-network-highly-centralized"}]},{"content":"<cite index=\"4-1,4-2,4-5\">According to a report by Bloomberg News Wednesday (April 1), the incident on the Solana blockchain was flagged by cybersecurity and data analytics firms and acknowledged by Drift itself in a post on X. \"Drift Protocol is experiencing an active attack,\" the post said. The amount of cryptocurrencies involved, as determined by blockchain data analysts, could make this one of the biggest hacks in crypto's history, the Bloomberg report added, noting that some of the stolen crypto was converted into Circle's USDC stablecoin.</cite> <cite index=\"2-30,2-31,2-34\">Two critical potential vulnerabilities were disclosed in December 2025 via GitHub security advisories, and Anza said the issues were patched in collaboration with Firedancer, Jito, and the Solana Foundation. One issue involved Solana's gossip system, the mechanism validators use to share certain network messages even when block production is disrupted. Per Anza, a missing verification step could have allowed an attacker to flood validators with invalid vote messages in a way that interfered with normal vote handling, potentially stalling consensus if done at scale.</cite>","heading":"Recent Security Vulnerabilities","severity":"high","sources":[{"credibility":2,"name":"Solana-Based DeFi Exchange Suffers $285 Million Hack","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2026/solana-based-defi-exchange-suffers-285-million-hack/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Terrifying Solana flaw just exposed","type":"news_article","url":"https://cryptoslate.com/terrifying-solana-flaw-just-exposed-how-easily-the-always-on-network-could-have-been-stalled-by-hackers/"}]}],"sources_used":[{"credibility":2,"name":"A Complete History of Solana Outages: Causes and Fixes","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.helius.dev/blog/solana-outages-complete-history"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Solana (blockchain platform) - Wikipedia","type":"official","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Report Exposes 98.6% of Solana Meme Coins on Pump.fun as Fraudulent","type":"news_article","url":"https://news.bitcoin.com/report-exposes-98-6-of-solana-meme-coins-on-pump-fun-as-fraudulent/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Solana Investor Sues Project Insiders, Claims Network Is 'Highly Centralized'","type":"news_article","url":"https://blockworks.co/news/solana-investor-sues-project-insiders-claims-network-highly-centralized"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Solana-Based DeFi Exchange Suffers $285 Million Hack","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2026/solana-based-defi-exchange-suffers-285-million-hack/"}],"summary":"Solana is a high-performance blockchain platform that has experienced significant technical instability, ecosystem fraud, and regulatory challenges since its 2020 launch. While positioned as an \"Ethereum killer,\" the network has suffered from multiple outages, massive meme coin scams, and legal scrutiny regarding its centralization and potential securities classification.","timeline":[{"date":"2020-03-16","event":"Solana mainnet launched","source":"Wikipedia","source_url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"date":"2021-09-14","event":"17-hour network outage caused by transaction spam during Grape Protocol IDO","source":"Wikipedia","source_url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"date":"2022-07-01","event":"Class action lawsuit filed against Solana Labs alleging unregistered securities sales","source":"Wikipedia","source_url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"date":"2022-08-03","event":"9,231 Solana wallets hacked, $8 million stolen due to Slope Finance vulnerability","source":"Wikipedia","source_url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"date":"2022-10-01","event":"6-hour network outage due to consensus bug in validator client","source":"Wikipedia","source_url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"date":"2022-11-11","event":"SOL price dropped 40% following FTX bankruptcy announcement","source":"Wikipedia","source_url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"date":"2023-06-06","event":"SEC sued Coinbase alleging SOL is an unregistered security","source":"Wikipedia","source_url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"date":"2024-02-06","event":"Last major network outage lasting 5 hours","source":"Protos","source_url":"https://protos.com/chart-its-been-262-days-since-solanas-last-major-outage/"},{"date":"2025-01-01","event":"SOL reached all-time high of $294 following Trump memecoin launch","source":"Wikipedia","source_url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)"},{"date":"2026-04-01","event":"Drift Protocol on Solana suffered $285 million hack","source":"PYMNTS","source_url":"https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2026/solana-based-defi-exchange-suffers-285-million-hack/"}]},"v":1}