Solana's Six-Year Review: Survived Multiple Outages and Hacker Attacks, SOL Price Surged from $8 to $96

Gate News reports that on March 18, Solana celebrated its sixth anniversary of mainnet launch. Since its launch in 2020 by Anatoly Yakovenko, Raj Gokal, and others, the blockchain has experienced multiple major outages and market shocks. The community summarizes its development as “getting through another tough quarter.”

(Source: Protos)

Looking back, Solana faced stability challenges early on. In December 2020, a vulnerability in the Turbine module caused about six hours of network downtime. In September 2021, during the Grape Protocol IDO on Raydium, a flood of bot trading requests overwhelmed the network, triggering over 300,000 transactions per second and causing a 17-hour outage. Since then, outages have become a key topic of market discussion.

2022 marked a critical turning point. The year saw multiple outages and security incidents, including the Wormhole cross-chain bridge attack resulting in over $320 million in losses, NFT minting bot attacks causing consensus failures, and wallet service provider vulnerabilities leading to asset theft. Additionally, the manipulation of Mango Markets’ price by Avraham Eisenberg further damaged trust in the ecosystem.

In November 2022, the bankruptcy of FTX and Alameda Research delivered the biggest blow. Sam Bankman-Fried, a long-time supporter of Solana, collapsed, causing market panic. SOL’s price dropped from about $33 to less than $10, a 97% decline from its all-time high. In 2023, developer and project attrition increased, putting additional pressure on the ecosystem.

Despite frequent issues, Solana continued operating. Between 2023 and 2024, the network experienced multiple failures, including validator node anomalies and code vulnerabilities causing prolonged outages. Data shows that Solana’s total downtime has exceeded three days, accompanied by performance degradation and billions of dollars in losses from security incidents.

After ongoing turbulence, SOL’s price rebounded to around $96 in 2026. Anatoly Yakovenko called this “the result of six years of effort,” but market confidence in its stability remains cautious. For investors, Solana’s long-term performance will depend on whether its network reliability and ecosystem recovery can continue to improve.