High Traffic Causes Performance Issues In Solana And NFTs

On Saturday, two of the leading smart contract platforms faced performance problems after transactions were frozen due to the high demands from NFTs.

The Solana blockchain had to be restarted after it came to a standstill again. While Ethereum did not stop, the cost of block space reached the highest levels in 2020.

The source of the problems in both the cases was the high traffic; however, the reaction of both the networks was completely different.

As per status.solana.com, no blocks were being produced in Solana for almost 8 hours. The operations were restarted after a “cluster restart ” was performed by network validators.

The source of the outage reportedly could be caused by extreme congestion because of specialized bots or automated software programs that try to “blind mint” NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and immediately resell them on secondary markets. The traffic was so intense that the network faced a breakdown in consensus, which is a cascade effect that could lead to the ultimate showdown of blockchain.

For months we’ve seen congestion issues on Solana.
Source: NFT and arb/liquidations bots.
When a new project mints bots try to snipe the mints and immediately relist on secondary market places for $$.
The past two weeks has seen an escalation in bot activity…
— Laine | stakewiz.com (@laine_sa_) May 1, 2022

Anatoly Yakovenko, the Solana Labs co-founder, endorsed a tweet by one Solana validator, which stated that the restarts could be “incredibly frustrating, time-consuming & upsetting to SOL supporters, investors and everyone else involved.” It further stated that, fortunately, this went well; however, it’s not desirable.

Metaplex was the source of most of the transactions. Metaplex’s Candy Machine tool Solana-based NFT projects rely on the release of their collection as per the group.

Ethereum Has Near-perfect Uptime Record But Gets Costly

In the whole of its history, the Ethereum network has had a near-perfect uptime record. However, high demand periods could result in making the blockchain costly because of the extreme spike in transaction fees.

During the NFT mint, more than 64,078 ETH, worth around $180 million, was spent as per the data from Etherscan. The amount of ether burned shows a corresponding rise on May 1st because of the Ethereum upgrade EIP-1559 last year.

The fee market of Ethereum is based on demand and supply; however, 13 transactions per second is its maximum throughput, which is what makes the protocols vulnerable to extreme rise during the phases of peak demand.