Solana blockchain experienced a major outage Tuesday and then was forced to restart. A massive surge in transaction volume and bot activity caused outages on Solana's network for over 17 hours. Solana's core developers said they decided to upgrade and restart the network, a controversial move among the decentralized ethos.

The restart helped restore the network's functionality the next day. Solana promised it will continue to apply fixes to help prevent future instability and will provide a "detailed post mortem" on the outage for the community in the upcoming weeks. But the economic damage was done, with the price of the Solana (SOL) token cratering over 35% from its record high last week. AnalystS noted Solana's outage and its fix showed it is "far from unstoppable" and not as decentralized or self-sufficient as previously believed, adding the troubles could highlight the case for Ethereum's established stability.

Here is the rest of the week in review:

OpenSeas, a leading non-fungible token marketplace, introduced policies to ban insider trading, after it confirmed an executive at the company was purchasing artworks before they were promoted on the front page. CEO and cofounder Devin Finzer said Thursday: "This is incredibly disappointing. We want to be clear that this behaviour does not represent our values as a team," adding the firm is taking an independent review of the incident. OpenSeas said it is changing its policy to prohibit employees from trading from featured collections and using confidential information to trade NFTs. Crypto traders noticed on the Ethereum blockchain that an anonymous user was regularly buying items from the public marketplace shortly before they were promoted on the website's coveted front page, which attracts significant interest. The user would then sell the NFT assets and profit immensely in just hours. The new NFT market is loosely regulated with few restrictions on activity, which some critics cite as evidence the space is more for speculation than creativity.

Bakkt, the crypto exchange owned by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE  ), announced Friday it obtained approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to complete its merger deal with SPAC VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings (VIH  ). Bakkt CEO Gavin Michael said: "We are thrilled to have reached this milestone and look forward to successfully completing the proposed business combination with VIH." He added the firm is excited about the unique growth opportunities ahead and remains "laser focused on furthering our vision of connecting the digital economy." The 2 firms first unveiled their plan to merge and make Bakkt go public in January. VIH is affiliated with Chicago-based investment firm Victory Park Capital. Bakkt operates consumer products including digital wallets, crypto trading, and gift card management, as well as institutional asset custody and derivatives services. VIH shareholders are slated to meet on October 14 to vote to approve the merger.

Crypto prices traded flat to $2.12 trillion this week. For the majors, all except Bitcoin (BTC) slipped. In the top 100, the biggest losers were Elrond (EGLD), down 18%, Arweave (AR), down 18%, and FTX Token (FTT), down 18%. The biggest gainers were Ren (REN), up 31%, Cosmos (ATOM), up 26%, and Audius (AUDIO), up 25%. Next week traders will watch which direction the market goes.

The author owns a small amount of BTC.