Over 4 Million transactions from Solan’s NFT minting bots have brought the network down for seven hours this past weekend. It marked the seventh time the network was down this year due to security issues.
The seventh breakdown of the year
An unprecedented 4 million NFT transactions sent by bots through Candy Machine, a Solana-based project, once again collapsed the Solana network, rendering validators unable to push transactions through. The network was down for 7 hours – from 8:00 p.m. UTC on Saturday to 3:00 a.m. on Sunday – and its services have been fully restored since then.
According to Metaplex, the bots on their apps were responsible for the crash that extended to the whole Solana network. Metaplex is one of the largest NFT communities on Solana that allows users to launch their own NFT projects.
After identifying such an incident, Metaplex announced that “to combat this, we have merged and will soon be rolling out a botting penalty to the program as part of a larger effort to stabilize the network.”
Metaplex also said it will implement a 0.01 SOL or $0.89 “penality” charge on wallets that try to process invalid transactions, categorized as “typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint.” Only this year, the Solana network has undergone seven times of outages as such.
Security issue
The Ethereum challenger has been criticized for increasing incidents of network instability. Earlier this year, Solana suffered several outages, with the most severe causing the network to go offline for 48 hours. Similarly, it was “excessive duplicate transactions” by bots that crashed the system. Solana logging out frequently has drawn a lot of criticism from industry experts and users.
FTX’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) admitted in January that when it came to the Solana network, there was tremendous room for improvement. Despite the network’s recent shortcomings, the FTX boss believed it was still superior to other layer-one chains due to its ability to process more transactions than other major networks combined.
