Amid the rising market for Solana NFT collections, the blockchain has seen an exponential increase in activity and force from malicious users. These activities are rising so much that they crashed the entire Solana network on Saturday, April 30th.
According to a postmortem report by Solana Labs, the blockchain network was overwhelmed on the day of the crash as malicious users sent a barrage of transactions. This they did in a bid to out-compete legitimate users during minting. During minting, collectors acquire newly generated NFT collectables from a project.
The attack brought down the whole network process completely. Validators and contributors had a tough time finding out what was wrong and attempting to restore the service; this took nothing less than seven hours.
Over the past year, NFTs have gained the interest of many who are now users. This interest has generated a lot of traffic on platforms like Ethereum and Solana. However, Ethereum is the largest industry, yielding billions in NFT trade monthly; Solana is gaining ground so quickly.
From reports from CryptoSlam, Solana has seen nothing less than $2.2 billion worth of NFT from inception till the present time. It is believed that this significant rise in trade and the grounding of Solana has driven quite a few credible users to the platform.
Solana has gained some ground in the NFT industry because of its speedy transactions and low fees. However, the CTO for Metaplex believes that these reasons can make the platform susceptible to attacks from malicious users.
Bots face a penalty.
Shortly after the service was restored and Solana returned online, the company stated that there would now be penalties for submitting invalid transactions by MetaPlex botting. This means that the accumulation of failed transactions trying to mint through an automated program will be charged.
Before the implementation, there had been no charge or penalty for people using botting programs, even to out-compete legitimate users.
Phan said, “They were trying to hammer the candy machine programme just as the mint was opening, so none of the users could get in.” “And then they would just leave their bots on forever, which is annoying for everyone.” Because there was no real monetary impact on them, they were just like ‘OK, whatever, it doesn’t matter.’”
