Solana Was Offline. Again

GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and we've successfully reached the middle of this week.

⭐️Today's selection:

• 🤧Solana Troubles
• 🧋Wednesday Bubbles
• 👌Selected Meme of The Day
• 📰Bite-Sized News

SOLANA MAJOR OUTAGE

Solana, a popular blockchain platform, experienced a major network outage for 20 hours on February 25th, causing concern that it could happen again in the future.

The problem was resolved after a second restart, but the exact cause of the malfunction remains unknown.

While the market reaction has been fairly muted (as you will see in Wednesday bubbles), such a disruption could be a devastating blow to the ecosystem in the future.

To avoid future outages, today Solana's developers are making changes to the network's deployment mechanism and bringing in external auditors and testers to ensure that future software releases are more stable. Sounds like it is a bit too late, isn't it?

Though, these changes include creating a re-image of the testnet, improving the restart process, and having a team dedicated to searching for exploits in the underlying protocols.

The goal is to improve network stability and prevent future failures.

According to SolanaFM instrument - when it comes to all the TPS on Solana (transactions per second), only about 10% are real transactions, while the rest is validator communication.

This creates huge amounts of data for full nodes, who have to store all chain history and deal with millions of useless validation messages.

This issue is considered one of the reasons for Solana's network outages.

However, Solana's problems don't end here.

Solana's on-chain activity also confirms the difficulty faced by the blockchain.

Daily active users have never fully recovered from the 2022 bear, and the trend was further negatively impacted by the failure of FTX and Alameda.

So… the network outage came at a moment Solana had to prove that it could be a top 5 chain even without its patrons. Here are some metrics that illustrate that:

• TVL (Total Value Locked) on Solana has decreased tenfold since June 2022 (right now it's $257m)
• Development activity on Solana has slowed down. In comparison to Avalanche and Fantom, Solana has less than 80 deployed smart contracts on it, while AVAX has over 1000 and FTM over 1800.

Ongoing problems become a problem in itself. It becomes a reason why many projects are increasingly choosing to move to other chains.

"DeGods" and y00ts, the leading NFTs projects on Solana, have declared their move to Ethereum and Polygon, sending a clear signal that they are losing confidence in the platform.

Solana's tainted reputation could also be a problem in attracting talent and projects.

If Solana wants to remain relevant, it needs to address its issues and rebuild its reputation, or risk being left behind as the cryptocurrency market continues to evolve.

TL;DR: 

Solana, the prominent blockchain network, continues facing problems. This time the entire network went through a 24 hour outage.

WEDNESDAY BUBBLES

As mentioned previously, Solana's outage was an important event. Yet, the market chose to ignore it. At least for now.

Let's see what are the winners and losers of the last 7 days.

Let's begin with STX, who just hit yet another milestone.

Reminder: Stacks is a bitcoin layer 2 solution for smart contracts that enables DeFi, NFT and various decentralised applications. Their token is STX.

So what is going on?

The world saw more than 200k Inscriptions on Bitcoin Ordinals (in total). This led to a further increase in the interest for .btc domains.

Nevertheless, the blockchain activity remains low and doesn't really justify the STX price surge. Only around 1,000 unique active wallets engaged with DApps on Stacks in February.

Yet the token's value has surged, and that's how life in crypto works.

Btw, if you've got $2 to spare... You can mint a .btc domain. The price for it is 2$STX (~$2).

If you are up for it, here's what you gotta do:

Install Hiro Wallet or Xverse.

Send yourself some $STX tokens. You can trade them here.

Go to the https://btc.us and connect the wallet.

And, to finish it, enter the domain name, if available -> click on "Claim" -> "Continue" and confirm the transactions. Voila!

Moreover, even the creators of BAYC are about to mint their own collection.

Yuga Labs launches the TwelveFold NFT collection on the Ordinals protocol. 

An experimental generative art collection of 300 pieces that will live on the Bitcoin blockchain.

And now, let's take a look at MKR.

For those new to the world of crypto, MakerDAO is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that offers users a stablecoin called DAI.

Recently, MakerDAO made a big announcement: they've launched a new project called Spark Protocol, which directly competes with another DeFi platform called Aave (which allows earning interest on lending/borrowing).

What's noteworthy about this news is that MakerDAO used to focus on integrating DAI into other existing DeFi protocols.

However, with Spark Protocol, MakerDAO is now taking a different approach and wants to create a whole new DeFi ecosystem.

This is a significant shift in strategy for MakerDAO, and it will be interesting to see how the new competition will play out in the DeFi space.

So that's that, those were the bubbles!

SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY

BITE-SIZED NEWS

• Coinbase Launches National Advocacy Campaign For Crypto-Friendly Policies. Friend request sent to crypto-friendly policy makers.
• The Majority of Voyager Customers Agree with Binance.US Restructuring Plan. Construction time, again.
• Tel Aviv Stock Exchange Takes a Step Towards Offering Crypto Trading Services. Step by step.

ack in 2017-19, the project managed to