Solana narrowly avoided a transaction finality halt after approximately 28.83% of staked SOL went offline due to a routing failure, coming within 4.5 percentage points of the critical 33.34% threshold. The network’s Tower BFT consensus mechanism requires about 66.67% of staked SOL to actively participate in order to finalize transactions, meaning that if more than 33.34% of stake goes dark, the network loses the supermajority needed to confirm transactions are permanent. Validators going offline on Solana face no slashing penalties but simply stop earning rewards, sparking renewed debate about incentives for redundancy investments. The incident, which points to a systemic rather than individual failure, occurred after the network had maintained over 30 months without a full outage, with the last major disruption dating back to February 2024.
Source: Read the original article
