Last week, the Solana blockchain had a seven-hour downtime between Saturday and Sunday due to a rush of transactions initiated by bots on the blockchain minting NFT. This is the sixth outage recorded by the Solana network in 2022. These disruptions occurred at extremely close intervals.
On the Solana network, NFT minting bots generated a record-breaking four million transactions at a rate of 100 gigabits per second. This resulted in network congestion, and validators were unable to secure the network, effectively shutting down Solana. After a seven-hour downtime, the validators were able to resume on Solana on Sunday.
“Validator operators successfully restarted Mainnet Beta at 3:00 AM UTC, following an approximately seven-hour downtime caused by the network failing to reach consensus,” Solana tweeted. Over the next several hours, network operators and decentralised applications will continue to restore client services.
The minting bots took over a key function of the Solana blockchain utilised by NFT applications. These bots are used to start what is known as Candy Machines, which are NFT machines. It was proven that the bots contributed to the downtime of the Solana network.
Metaplex declared that wallet addresses attempting to finish an incorrect transaction will be charged a 0.01 SOL fee to avoid additional crashes. According to the business, such transactions are “usually carried out by bots that are mindlessly attempting to mint.”
Due to the network disruption, SOL’s price fell significantly to roughly $84. However, SOL’s price shows a modest price rebound at about $89.14. The Solana network had various disruptions spanning between eight and eighteen hours this year alone. Solana said that the bots reduced the network’s capacity to “several thousand” TPS, far less than the developers’ advertised 50,000 transactions per second.
Solana had a 29-hour outage at the end of January due to network congestion and disruptions caused by an influx of transactions. One of the worst outages on Solana occurred in September when the network was down for more than 17 hours. According to Solana, the disruption was brought about by a distributed denial-of-service assault. With 400,000 transactions per second, bots clogged the network.
