Marinade Says 28.83% of Solana Stake Went Delinquent, Nearing Finality Halt

Solana came within roughly 4.5 percentage points of losing transaction finality early Wednesday, when 28.83% of staked SOL went delinquent, according to staking protocol Marinade Finance.

Marinade said the episode affected 90 validators and cost them a combined 333 SOL in rewards. The reported delinquency remained below the 33.34% threshold Marinade said would stop finality. Solana’s public status page listed no incident for Aug. 12.

On Solana, a block becomes confirmed after at least 66% of stake votes on it; finalization also requires at least 31 subsequent confirmed blocks, according to infrastructure provider Helius. The function most directly threatened by losing more than one-third of stake is therefore confirmation and finality: an online leader can still produce a “processed” block before it receives the stake-weighted votes required for confirmation.

Marinade said that if delinquency had exceeded one-third, “nothing finalizes.”

Teraswitch’s Network and the Delinquent Stake

PeeringDB identifies Teraswitch as the operator of AS20326. Marinade said AS20326 carried 118.89 million SOL — more than one-quarter of all staked SOL — and that 94% of it went dark at once.

The correlated delinquency was not confined to stake on AS20326. Another 14.1 million SOL on Latitude.sh, Limestone, Butterfly Research and Allnodes went down in the same minutes. Marinade said it could not determine from its data whether that reflected a shared dependency or coincidence.

Marinade described the AS20326 disruption as a Teraswitch routing fault. In its official incident report, Teraswitch confirmed that customers at LON1, AMS1-3, DUB1-2, FRA2, SGP1-2 and TYO1-3 lost reachability to internet destinations. The provider said its other North American sites were not affected.

Teraswitch said a default route associated with its Miami site was propagated with its metric and routing communities stripped. A route reflector at AMS2 sent the altered route into the provider’s European and Asia-Pacific markets, where edge routers preferred it over valid local routes. Downstream core routers rejected the malformed route, leaving the affected sites without an acceptable default path.

Engineers identified the malformed route within 10 minutes and removed Miami from the private backbone, Teraswitch said. Service was restored at 4:16:15 a.m. UTC. The provider had not identified whether the underlying defect was in its Miami edge routers or the AMS2 route reflector and said a full report would follow.

Marinade said 59 validators holding 80.2 million SOL returned in the same narrow window and that nobody failed over before routing reconverged. The staking protocol said it will review its concentration limits by autonomous system and data center and publish whether validators use hot-swap systems and automatic failover.

Solana’s February 2024 outage halted block finalization for about five hours after a software bug stalled more than 95% of cluster stake, according to the official incident report. This time, Solana’s status page listed no incident, while Teraswitch’s promised root-cause report and Marinade’s concentration review remain the next tests of the shared infrastructure risk.