Key Takeaways:
- The Solana Blockchain is back online after a seven-hour outage.
- The disturbance was caused by a swarm of bots trying to create nonfungible tokens on the crypto network.
- SOL’s pricing has decreased by 5% due to network difficulties in the last 24 hours.
Following a seven-hour outage caused by a significant flood of bots attempting to create nonfungible tokens on the crypto network, the Solana Blockchain is back online.
Late Saturday, Candy Machine, an NFT minting application for Solana, faced a deluge of traffic from bots attempting to force through transactions, leading Solana’s mainnet to lose consensus and crash as validator nodes buckled under the weight. Validators are machines that review transactions to ensure the integrity of the blockchain.
“Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus as an unlimited quantity of inbound transactions (4m per second) flooded the community, topping 100gbps,” according to an earlier tweet. A final Google doc containing instructions to restart the cluster at slot 131973970 was delivered late Saturday night by a validator collaborating via the Solana discord.
According to engineers and developers from the Solana Foundation and Jump Crypto, traffic reached a record-breaking peak of 4 million transactions per second. Validators performed a cluster restart on Sunday morning, allowing Solana to function with reduced throughput as nodes gradually came back online.
The Solana Foundation noted in a release that “The transaction load on Solana Mainnet Beta grew dramatically, reaching 400,000 TPS at one point. Because network-critical communications were not prioritized, these transactions overloaded the transaction processing queue, causing the network to fork.”
SOL’s pricing has decreased by 5% due to network difficulties in the last 24 hours. This was an increase of 65.44 percent over the previous November’s ATH of $260.06. The RSI dipped into the oversold territory at 20.52 in the early hours of the morning, indicating increasing dispersion.
This might be linked to skeptic investors abandoning their shares as a result of concerns about the downturn. The RSI was 38 at the time of writing, indicating a reversal and a push towards the 50-neutral level.
As a result of increased adoption, Solana Blockchain has experienced network congestion in recent months. As a result, user transactions have been impeded. With more than two downtimes recorded this year alone, the network appears to have a long way to go before truly living up to its moniker of “Ethereum Killer.”
Other Blockchains that Suffered
It’s not just Solana Blockchain that struggled over the weekend due to the high demand for NFTs. As a result of the high demand for digital land in Yuga Labs’ unreleased metaverse game, Bored Ape Yacht Club, transaction fees on Ethereum skyrocketed on Saturday, making it temporarily more expensive to mint NFTs than to buy land plots.
