The Solana blockchain (SOL) was down for more than 7 hours on Saturday night following a bot attack on the “Candy Machine”, which is used to mine non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This is the 7th network outage since the beginning of this year.
Solana suffers another network outage
The blockchain Solana (SOL) has experienced some trouble this weekend. Indeed, during the night of Saturday to Sunday, the network suffered a crash before returning to normal after 7 long hours.
The cause of the failure was an influx of bots on the “Candy Machine”, a popular tool on Solana used to mine non-fungible tokens (NFTs). More than 4 million transactions were sent to the network by the bots, the equivalent of more than 100 gigabits of data per second.
The network became saturated, and the node validators were no longer able to establish a consensus to validate the transactions. The blockchain came to a complete halt at around 10pm on Saturday night, before being restarted 7 hours later by the network validators who were jointly given the steps to follow via a Discord server.
A joint effort praised by Anatoly Yakavenko, the co-founder of Solana Labs, explaining that he was unreachable during the failure:
“The Solana validator community are legends. It’s amazing to see so many new people step up and take charge of getting things back up and running.”
To prevent a future outage of this nature and to act as a barrier to bots, Metaplex, the originator of the Candy Machine, announced that a 0.01 SOL penalty would now be applied to wallets attempting to make an invalid transaction, which it says is “usually done by bots blindly trying to mine.”
This is the 7th failure this year for the Solana blockchain, whose mainnet is officially still in Beta phase. An umpteenth hitch for the Solana network, which has also annoyed many users who have not failed to show their displeasure on Twitter.
The price of the SOL was only briefly affected, going from 91.65 dollars to 85 dollars, before rising quickly to stabilize. It is currently at $86.79 at the time of writing.
