Solana experienced another outage this time due to a surge in the volume of transactions flooded by Candy Machine NFT bots, increasing network congestion.
Solana had a rough month in January, with six outages in all.
Blockchains frequently have scalability concerns since they are inadequate at handling the load that Web2.0 can handle without experiencing serious issues. Over the weekend, the Layer-1 Ethereum competitor Solana experienced a 7-hour downtime.
According to Solana, the network got an incredible number of transactions every second. It might reach 4 million times per second. Additionally, the Solana blockchain got 100 gigabits of data per second, causing network congestion.
Seven-hour Outage
On Saturday about 8:00 PM UTC, the network fell offline. Validators were back in action seven hours later, at 3:00 AM UTC. The Candy Machine, an NFT minting project for Solana, encountered a lot of bot traffic. The mainnet had crashed consensus because the validators’ nodes had all failed to withstand the weight of the transactions.
Validators are machines that verify transactions while protecting the blockchain’s integrity. These validators conducted a mainnet cluster restart yesterday morning.
Solana Plunges by 7%
Bots were mostly to blame for clogging up the network and triggering a blackout. Metaplex confirmed on Twitter that traffic from their bots was also to blame for the outage.
Metaplex also claimed that it will institute a charge of 0.01 Solana (SOL), or $0.89, on wallets to assist in the completion of invalid transactions. The bots are usually the ones who complete these transactions. The coin had lost 7% of its market value due to the downtime, and it was observed exchanging hands for $84.
Following the network’s recovery, the altcoin’s price is now $88. During the first and second weeks of January, the altcoin’s network encountered a number of problems. It caused the network to be down for an entire 18 hours.
A total of nearly 30 hours of network downtime was observed during the third week of January 2022.
Excessive duplicate transactions triggered the outages, which produced more congestion. The crypto community is really concerned about the continual problem of outages. These disruptions have disproportionately impacted the Solana neighborhood.
During the first quarter of 2022, there were around 11 such incidents on the coin. Any disruption to the coin’s blockchain network will have a negative impact on transactions that come to a halt during a crisis.
The second network to be significantly impacted by an increase in transaction volumes connected to NFTs is SOL. The issuance of 55,000 NFTs by Yuga Labs has increased Ethereum’s gas fees.
