Phantom, Solana’s biggest wallet faces downtime during the GRASS airdrop

The biggest wallet on the Solana blockchain is currently undergoing a downtime. The users facing issues with inaccurate account balances for an hour now.

The incident happened while the users of Grass, a decentralized app on the Solana blockchain were looking to claim the tokens from the airdrop. The airdrop was important to the user as it involved the 10% distribution of all current GRASS tokens to the selected users. Grass is an AI data layer on Solana and the project’s airdrop was a stress test for Phantom’s stability.

The status page of Phantom shows the “major incident” in its backend

The company also alerted the users on their X account that “some services may be temporarily disrupted” and if they wanted to make an urgent transaction they can move forward by ignoring the “simulation error” and keep using the dApp.

“We’re currently experiencing an uptime incident, and some services may be temporarily disrupted. If you are in urgent need of making a transaction, please ignore simulation errors and try using a dapp,” Phantom said in a post on X platform.

Furthermore, the company also said that their team was currently trying to resolve the issue. Although Phantom team said they were working on the issue, the incident raised concerns within the cryptocurrency market. Phantom is a widely used cryptocurrency wallet on the Solana ecosystem, which stirred panic on the crypto community as users were unable to carry out transactions or access their funds.

The blackout is also seen as another warning shot of the vulnerabilities that can affect even well-established digital wallets. While the Phantom team asked users to exercise caution and stay informed through its official channels, some users also encouraged the team to “please fix this” with haste.

Phantom assures users of restored service

In a later update to users, Phantom said the service had been restored, while the team would continue monitoring the situation.

“Our services should be working well for most users now. The team will continue to actively monitor the situation. We appreciate everyone’s patience. We’re taking all necessary steps to prevent issues like this in the future.”

Phantom.

While some users generally welcomed the quick response by the Phantom team, some users felt more still need to be done to ensure smooth operations and nip the problem in the bud once and for all.

“You always say the same thing every time. Pretty sure you said this the last time your wallet packed up. Fix up guys,” responded a user identified as bigchops.sol on X platform.

This is reportedly not the first time that the Solana-based decentralized app has experienced an outage in 2024. Phantom experienced delays with how token balances were being updated on February 3, 2024. Six months later, on August 15 specifically, the company indicated it experienced a “temporary issue that prevented users from properly seeing account balances.”

The following day, its website reported temporary issues and the issues were resolved with haste in both cases. The Solana network however continues functioning normally, despite the wallet’s issues, and able to handle the increased load without interruptions.

Announced in September with two million active users, the Grass network is powered by more than three million users running nodes to scrape petabytes of data for AI models.