Coinbase Prime faces Solana transaction-processing issues

The institutional-investor custodial service Coinbase Prime faced difficulties moving SOL to cold wallets due to a bug that last week took the Solana network offline, according to Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital.

Looks like custodians are unable to move SOL in cold storage due to the durable nonce bug that took down Solana.

(TL;DR: Solana doesn’t use nonces except in a special type of transaction called “durable transactions,” for offline use. This was disabled.)https://t.co/6HSiWHnGAj pic.twitter.com/pA7xzLlgSE

— Haseeb Qureshi (@hosseeb) June 8, 2022

“As the Solana network undergoes an update, custodial on-chain transactions through Prime Vault and Custody, including the creation of new wallets, withdrawals and staking, are temporarily disabled,” according to Coinbase Prime.

The service team emphasised that clients’ assets are safe. Users can make deposits to existing wallets, and active stakers will continue to receive rewards.

On 1 June, the Solana network did not produce new blocks for more than four hours did not produce new blocks due to a fault in processing “durable transaction nonces”, which disrupted consensus. The developers disabled this type of operation and asked validators to restart the blockchain.

Long-dated nonces (durable transaction nonces) are popular mainly among crypto exchanges. The feature is designed for token holders who use sophisticated automated signing setups, which means they cannot always promptly prepare transactions for on-chain registration.

For example, a custodian signing a transaction from two isolated devices might not finish within a single block. A normal Solana operation in such a case would not pass, but the aforementioned feature allows pre-signing offline to bypass this limitation.

Solana developers explained that long-dated nonces would be re-enabled once ‘measures to fix the situation’ have been adopted. The feature will be activated in the next software update.

In May 2022, the project team reported a desynchronisation between the network’s internal clocks and real time.

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