By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
The Solana blockchain faces yet another network downtime in 2022 as bots flood the Candy Machin NFT project with traffic resulting into major network congestion.
Layer-1 Ethereum-competitor Solana blockchain continues to face the issues with network downtime. Between April 30-May 1, the Solana blockchain network suffered a 7-hour long network outage amid a large number of transactions flooded by non-fungible token (NFT) bots.
As updated by Solana, the network saw an enormous amount of 4 million transactions per second. It also flooded the Solana blockchain with 100 gigabits of data per second causing major congestion. Besides, it also knocked out the validators from the consensus causing the Solana network to go dark.
The bots had exploited the popular NFT minting tool dubbed Candy Machine earlier on Saturday. This was the reason behind the explosion in traffic on the Solana blockchain. It happened roughly at 8 PM UTC on April 30. However, the validators and developers quickly started working on the matter to get the network up and running by May 1, 3 AM UTC. The official channel from Solana team reported:
“Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 3:00 AM UTC, following a roughly 7 hour outage after the network failed to reach consensus. Network operators an dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours”.
Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also credited the validator community for being swift in the mainnet recovery.
Bots Hoarding Candy Machine Application on Solana
Candy Machine, a popular application used by Solana NFT projects to launch collections, was hoarded by the bots. Metaplex, the company behind Candy Machine also confirmed the same. It blamed the bots for flooding their app with traffic resulting in the network collapse. On Sunday, May 1, Metaplex wrote:
“Today #Solana mainnet-beta went down partially due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. To combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network”.
Metaplex said that it would be imposing a small penalty on wallets that attempted to complete invalid transactions. These are typically wallets belonging to bots, says Metaplex.
Well, this was the seventh time in 2022 that the Solana blockchain was facing a network outage. Earlier in January, the network faced multiple issues that resulted in partial outages that lasted anywhere between 8 to 18 hours. On January 21, the Solana blockchain recorded its largest-ever 29-hour downtime.
After the recent outage over the last weekend, the SOL price tanked by 7% immediately hitting a low of $83. However, it has recovered by 10% since then as Solana is currently trading above $90.