For five hours, the Solana blockchain suffered an outage that impacted the value of its SOL token. This incident is similar to what happened last year.
This Tuesday, Solana, the blockchain platform that has been at the center of the scene due to its low latency and increasing activity, faced a setback with an outage that lasted around five hours. Amid this incident, the value of the SOL token on the Solana blockchain saw a drop from around $96 to below $94. However, it has managed to recover most of those losses since then.
It was an unsettling déjà vu, as these outages are not new to the Solana blockchain. Almost a year after a strike that left the network down for almost two days in April 2023. Today, the platform faced problems again.
During the outage, Laine, a Solana validator, shared that the Solana Mainnet-Beta was experiencing a performance degradation, with block progression halted. Central engineers and validators were engaged in an active investigation to resolve the situation.
“Core engineers have identified a fix and are building a new version for Validators to upgrade. More details after testing is complete,” posted on X independent Solana validator Marty Superfast on February 6.
In a later statement, Laine indicated that senior engineers had identified a fix and were working on a new version for validators to implement. Additionally, it was revealed that validators were taking preventive measures by generating snapshots using the state of their local ledgers, thus preparing for an eventual reboot.
ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood Predicts Substitution of Gold for Bitcoin with the Popularization of Spot ETFs
Cathie Wood, the CEO of ARK Invest, has stated that a notable “substitution” of gold for Bitcoin (BTC) is occurring, and anticipates that the availability of spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) will help broaden this trend.
On ARK Invest’s “Big Ideas 2024” podcast, Wood highlighted that although the price of Bitcoin is primarily denominated in fiat currencies, such as the US dollar, the largest cryptocurrency has seen a steady rise compared to gold since its inception.
“There is now a substitution of Bitcoin, and we believe that this will continue now, that there is a much easier way… to access Bitcoin,” Wood stated.
Bitcoin has often been compared to gold as a store of value due to its finite supply and the difficulty of mining both gold and BTC. This contrast with other assets, such as national currencies, which can be freely printed, has led to the growing acceptance of Bitcoin as a safe haven.
Grayscale CEO Advocates Exchange Traded Options for Bitcoin ETFs
In an article published on February 5 on X, Michael Sonnenshein, Grayscale CEO, has expressed his support for the approval of exchange-traded options for spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) by regulators:
“As we look ahead, I think it’s never been more important for the crypto and ETF communities alike to advocate for the development of a robust listed options market for spot Bitcoin ETFs. Although GBTC has been in the public market since 2015, it was never accompanied by listed options, as they aren’t a feature of the OTC Market.”
He argues that options are beneficial to investors, as they support “price discovery and can help investors better navigate market conditions or achieve desired results, such as income generation.”
By Audy Castaneda
