In 2022, Solana suffers its seventh outage as bots infiltrate the network.
On Solana, NFT minting bots generated over 4 million transactions per second, causing validators to lose consensus and the network to break down for about seven hours.
Due to a huge amount of transactions from the nonfungible token (NFT) minting bots, the Solana network had a seven-hour downtime overnight between Saturday and Sunday.
The network became overcrowded due to a record-breaking four million transactions per second, or 100 gigabits of data per second, knocking validators out of consensus, resulting in Solana turning black at around 8:00 p.m. UTC on Saturday.
Validators didn’t properly resume the main network until seven hours later, at 3:00 a.m. UTC on Sunday.
The bots stocked up on Candy Machine, a popular tool used by Solana NFT initiatives to initiate collections. Metaplex stated the network disruption was largely caused by bot traffic on their app in a tweet.
Metaplex said that wallets that attempt to complete an invalid transaction would be charged 0.01 Solana (SOL), or $0.89 at the time of writing, which is usually done by bots that are mindlessly trying to mint, according to the company.
The outage caused SOL, the blockchain’s native token, to drop nearly 7% to $84, though prices have subsequently recovered to slightly over $89.
According to Solana’s own status reporting, this is the eighth time the company has experienced outages this year. The network had troubles from January 6 to 12, 2022, resulting in partial outages lasting 8 to 18 hours.
Solana said that “heavy compute transactions” reduced network capacity to a few thousand transactions per second (TPS), far less than the 50,000 TPS projected.
Excessive duplicate transactions caused network congestion and disruptions on the blockchain again on the 21st and 22nd of January, resulting in almost 29 hours of downtime.
Solana’s network was down for nearly 17 hours in September 2021 due to a massive outage. Solana blamed the downtime on a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assault on an early decentralized exchange (DEX) offering, in which bots bombarded the network with 400,000 requests per second. Observers in the industry weighed in on what has been dubbed an “Ethereum killer.”
Over the weekend, Solana was the second network to be strained by a high amount of NFT transactions. Due to the release of 55,000 NFTs by Yuga Labs, the average Ethereum transaction cost increased to over $450, with some users spending up to 5 Ether (ETH), or $14000, in gas costs and much more to mint one of the NFTs.