The NFT minting infrastructure of Solana caused a network outage as the new month kicked off. The seven-hour breakdown is reportedly the result of bots taking over the minting tool Candy Machine on Solana. As the reports confirm, the network recorded a staggering four million transactions per second when it went offline.
Solana has continued to face difficulties keeping the network live since the beginning of the year. The network faced yet another breakdown as it stepped into the fifth month. On Sunday this week, the blockchain lost consensus as bots swarmed the network, and Solana’s transactions-per-second skyrocketed.
Following the network flooding in Candy Machine, the network abruptly went down for nearly seven hours. Then, the network was rebooted at around 11 a.m HKT with cluster instructions from developers through Twitter. Still, it goes down as a scar on Solana’s reputation as a reliable network.
The team of Solana’s developers is still analyzing the underlying issue behind the recent shutdown. Moreover, it is not just about the breakdown anymore as the network also took longer than expected to recover from it. As the breakdowns have become a routine now, crypto enthusiasts believe that it might be a big blow to the network’s name unless the blockchain finds a solution.
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The criticism of Solana’s latest failures points directly toward the stability of its consensus mechanism. The cheaper outlook of Solana inherently tends to invite more such attacks than Bitcoin or Ethereum.
The network has decided to limit the bot traffic on Candy Machine for the time being. So, the developers have announced a botting penalty to anyone trying to take advantage of Solana’s accessible infrastructure. They hope that this step will improve Candy Machine’s stability to a significant level currently.
However, this alone would not be enough to safeguard the network from such attacks in the future. Solana also faced several network-wide shutdowns in recent times due to some distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. So, it is high time for Solana to develop a substantial infrastructural solution for such attacks.
Solana’s breakdown was also reflected in the market as soon as it reached the public. SOL plunged to its lowest level since March. Still, the token partially compensated for the fall shortly after and is currently trading at $89.94. The demand for the coin is still healthy even after several breakdowns it has faced since the new year.
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It would also mean that the token has not drifted far off from the predictions for coming years. It is contingent on how effective the network is in tackling these attacks in the months to come.
