Solana Blockchain Getting Over an Agonizing Blackout

Solana network experienced a 7 hour outage amid the soaring NFT demands, bots flooded the ecosystem with an exceptional number of transactions.
Solana Network is going through some stability issues, and this newest event is another contribution to Solana stability woes.
As this article was being written, SOL, native token of the network, was trading at a market value of $89.96, up by 0.09% in the past 24 hours.

Energy Outage Caused By Bots

The Solana ecosystem is clawing back after going dark in a 7 hour outage, caused by subsequent rush of bots attempting to mint NFTs on the crypto network.

An NFT minting program for Solana network dubbed Candy Machine strived under a large wave of traffic from bots looking to push through transactions late Saturday, which was the reason behind Solana mainnet getting crashed and falling out to consensus as nodes belonging to validators shattered under the weight.

Validators are systems verifying transactions to maintain blockchain’s integrity.

Engineers and devs from Jump Crypto and Solana Foundation stated that traffic reached a record breaking high of 4 Million TPS at around 8 P.M. in London on Saturday.

On the next morning, verifiers had successfully finished a cluster restart, and Solana network was functioning at degraded performance as nodes steadily came back online.

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. https://t.co/ezqEYQYKWl
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) May 1, 2022

Longest Outage In Months

While the rise of Solana to the upper echelon of cryptocurrency’s top alternatives to Ethereum and Bitcoin has been constant, bots’ influx and stability issues meant this was the lengthiest blackout in recent months.

Solana experienced waves of outages and service issues running for more than 18 hours during January.

Though Solana’s indigenous token SOL was trading at a market value of $89.96, it fell over 7% because of the event, putting the token to swing at $83.90. Solana witnessed its highest high during November when it was trading at a market value of $259.

Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs applauded validators of network for working collectively so quickly in a tweet following the blackout, stating that he remained in transition while chaos unfolded.

He further added that, it is awesome to witness so many peeps to come forward and lead and take accountability of recovery.

In a reposted tweet by Solana Twitter account keeping an eye on the state of network, Metaplex, operator of Candy Machine stated that it strategizes to station a 0.01 SOL penalty in case a wallet tries to complete an invalid transaction.

Candy Machine creator will be offered discretion regarding how to utilize funds gathered from such penalties.

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. https://t.co/QaAZT3VxXz
— Metaplex (@metaplex) May 1, 2022

Solana was not the only element of cryptosphere that strived under the weight NFT demand at the weekend. Demand for BAYC metaverse by Yuga Labs (unreleased) was so large that it pushed transaction fees to the skies on the Ethereum network, meaning it costs more to mint NFT than acquiring a land parcel for a time being.

Steve Anderson is an Australian crypto enthusiast. He is a specialist in management and trading for over 5 years. Steve has worked as a crypto trader, he loves learning about decentralisation, understanding the true potential of the blockchain.

Latest posts by Steve Anderrson (see all)

Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/05/02/solana-blockchain-getting-over-an-agonizing-blackout/