According to Bloomberg News, the Solana blockchain is on the way to recovery after undergoing an outage for seven long hours. It was caused by bots rushing to mint NFT or non-fungible tokens on the crypto network.
What Was the Issue All About?
Known as Candy Machine, a non-fungible token minting program for Solana, it was subjected to a tsunami of bot traffic seeking to rush through transactions on Saturday. Solana’s main net fell out of consensus and crashed as the nodes that belong to validators were found to collapse under the weight. Validators are computers that are responsible for verifying transactions for the maintenance of the integrity of the blockchain.
Engineers and developers from Jump Crypto and Solana Foundation revealed that traffic had reached a record-breaking high of approximately 4 million transactions per second at 8 pm on Saturday in London. On Sunday, the validators completed a cluster restart, and the Solana network operated at degraded performance as nodes were found coming back online slowly.
While Solana has been quick in occupying one of the top positions as an alternative to the largest digital currency, namely Bitcoin, followed by Ethereum, the influx of bots has always been a cause of concern, causing the network to suffer blackouts longer than this period. Service-related issues have lasted for more than 18 hours in January, causing ire amongst the traders who helplessly watched the value of their portfolio drop while they could not offload the tokens.
Bloomberg News reports that the price of Solana overnight dropped by as much as 7.4% to $83.90, as per data on Bloomberg. It declined about 2% in New York on Sunday at about 6:54 am. However, it is still trading at 66% below the all-time high of $259, recorded back in November.
Solana was the only one in the cryptosphere to struggle due to the heavy rush of demand for non-fungible tokens traffic during the weekend. The unreleased metaverse game Bored Ape Yacht Club was so much in demand for digital land that on Saturday, it led a transaction fee on the Ethereum network to become astronomical, which means that temporarily it costs more to mint non-fungible tokens in comparison to buying a land parcel.
Developers in the Discord server, which is Solana technology-focused, stated that in an attempt to complete the SOL transactions might still experience issues for many hours until the network stabilizes again. Head of communications of Solana Foundation, Austin Federa, assured the investors that their funds were safe during the outage and blackout.
