NFT minting bots on Solana SOL contributed over 4 million transactions per second. They are knocking validators out of consensus and crashing the network for around seven hours.
The Solana SOL network suffered a seven-hour outage overnight between April 30 and May 1. Due to a large number of transactions from the nonfungible token (NFT) minting bots.
A record-breaking 4 million transactions, or 100 gigabits of data per second. It is congesting the network causing validators to go out of consensus resulting in Solana SOL. Further going dark at roughly 8 PM UTC on April 30.
It wasn’t until seven hours later on May 1, 3 AM UTC that validators were able to successfully restart the main network.
The bots hoarded a popular application used by Solana NFT projects to launch collections called ‘Candy Machine’. In a Twitter post by Metaplex, the company confirmed that traffic from bots on their app was partially to blame for the network crash.
Megaplex shared it would be implementing a 0.01 SOL or $0.89 charge on wallets that attempt to complete an invalid transaction.
Solana SOL has Caused the Outage Price
The outage caused the price of SOL, the blockchain’s native coin, to crash by nearly 7% to $84. However, trading since has seen prices recover to just over $89.
The most recent outage marks the 7th time this year that Solana has suffered outages according to its own status reporting. Between January 6 and January 12 in 2022 the network was plagued with issues. It is actually causing the partial outages for between 8 and 18 hours.
Solana said “high compute transactions” caused a reduction in network capacity to “several thousand” transactions per second (TPS). It is much lower than the advertised 50,000 TPS.
Later in January, over 29 hours of downtime was in between the 21st and 22nd of the month. Further, there are excessive duplicate transactions again causing network congestion and outages on the blockchain.
In September 2021, Solana was hit with a major outage with the network offline for over 17 hours. Solana attributed that outage to a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on an initial DEX offering with bots spamming the network with 400,000 per second.
Related: Solana’s (SOL) Price Probes Multi-Week Down Near $136.00
