The Solana blockchain is getting better after stepping in the dark in a 7-hour cut caused by a significant dush of bots trying to mint Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on the crypto network.
An NFT minting program for Solana named Candy Machine struggled under a flood of traffic from bots looking to push through transactions last Saturday.
This action caused Solana’s mainnet to disagree with consensus and crash as nodes belonging to validators collapsed under the weight.
Validators are computers that substantiate transactions to maintain the integrity of the blockchain.
From the foundation of Solana and Jump Crypto, developers and engineers said the traffic reached a record-breaking level of 4 million transactions a second at around 8 pm in London on Saturday.
By early morning, validators had successfully completed a cluster restart, and the Solana network was working at degraded performance as nodes came back online at a slow pace.
While Solana’s stood to the upper rank of cryptocurrency’s top alternatives, that is, Bitcoin and Ethereum, the stream of bots and with respect to the stability concerns meant this was not even its longest blackout in latest months.
The digital asset’s network went through a wave of blackouts and service issues that lasted for 18 hours in January, encouraging outrage from frustrated traders who watched their portfolio values reduce and were unable to discharge tokens.
There was an overnight analytics fluctuation that recorded the price of Solana’s SOL token falling as much as 7.4 % to $83.90. By the same evening, Solana had peeled back some of its losses but was still down to 3.21 % at $89.67.
The co-founder of the Solana Labs Anatoly Yakovenko, has also revealed that the network’s authenticators for working together so promptly in a tweet after the certain level of outage, saying he had been in transit while the chaos has been already being unfolded.
His words depicted that- It’s amazing to see so many new people step up and lead by taking ownership of recovery.
Candy Machine operator Metaplex stated it will now plan to use a 0.01 SOL ($0.89) penalty that will incur whenever a wallet attempts to complete an invalid transaction, “which is typically developed and made by bots that are blindly trying to rollback and recover.
The creator of that Candy Machine will be given caution on how to utilize funds collected from such penalties.
Developers in Solana’s technology-focused Discord server stated that wallets endeavoring to complete SOL transactions might experience issues for several hours until the network becomes stable as before.
