Solana has crashed on several occasions from invasions and it has recently suffered another crash from NFT mining bots.
Due to a huge amount of transactions from nonfungible token (NFT) minting bots, the Solana (SOL) network was down for seven hours between April 30 and May 1.
The network became overcrowded after a record-breaking 4 million transactions, or 100 gigabits of data per second, caused validators to lose consensus, resulting in the altcoin turning black at around 8 p.m. UTC on April 30.
According to a tweet from Metaplex, the outage was caused by “Due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine application, in part. To tackle this, we’ve integrated the programs and will shortly implement a botting penalty as part of a larger effort to stabilize the network.”
Austin Federa, head of comms for SOL, confirmed the crash last night on Twitter: “PSA: SOL mainnet beta fell out of consensus and the validator network couldn’t recover.”
Validators were able to successfully resume the main network seven hours later, at 3 a.m. UTC on May 1.
The altcoin’s Discord server, in particular, became a focal point for restoration efforts, with some urging node validators to alert others who were unaware of the outage.
Some have questioned the blockchain’s usefulness in the wake of Saturday’s outage, with several people, including Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson, tweeting jokes about it on social media.
The situation also reminds me of a 17-hour power outage that the altcoin had in September. The Solana Foundation eventually blamed the “network slowdown” on “in effect, a denial of service attack” in a report.
Solana suffers huge losses from the outage
The altcoin has recouped most of its losses today, down less than 1% at $90.82, according to CoinMarketCap statistics, after plummeting to $83.06 during last night’s downtime.
The outage led the price of SOL, the blockchain’s native token, to plummet nearly 7% to $84, however prices have subsequently recovered to slightly over $89.
According to SOL’s own status reporting, this is the seventh time this year that the company has experienced disruptions. The network had troubles between January 6 and January 12 in 2022, resulting in partial outages lasting between 8 and 18 hours.
According to SOL, “heavy compute transactions” reduced network capacity to “a few thousand” transactions per second (TPS), far less than the anticipated 50,000 TPS.
Between the 21st and 22nd of January, the blockchain experienced over 29 hours of downtime, with excessive duplicate transactions creating network congestion and outages.
Solana was affected by a massive outage in September 2021, with the network down for almost 17 hours. Solana blamed the downtime on a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) assault on an early DEX offering, in which bots flooded the network with 400,000 requests per second. Industry watchers weighed in on what has been dubbed an “Ethereum killer.”
Over the weekend, Solana was the second network to see significant transaction traffic connected to NFTs. Due to the release of 55,000 NFTs by Yuga Labs, the average transaction cost increased to over $450, with some users spending up to 5 ETH or $14000 in gas costs for transactions and much more to mint one of the NFTs.
