The Solana network went down for 7 hours from April 30 to May 1. What is the explanation behind this? A massive flow of traffic, with 4 million transactions per second, or 100 gigabits per second of data. Keep track of statistics throughout the blockchain’s history.
This disruption is being caused by an invasion of bots.
Among the causes for this failure, it appears that the primary one is connected to bots, who have extensively employed Candy Machine, a tool that allows you to mint (produce) NFTs on the Solana blockchain.
Metaplex, the operator of Candy Machine, has also verified that this massive amount of transactions is, in large part, due to these bots, and has enforced 0.01 SOL penalty for each invalid transaction carried out.
After failing to achieve a consensus in the first place, the validators only managed to reboot the Solana blockchain 7 hours later, following explicit instructions supplied by one of the validators.
Users face severe repercussions.
Many people have expressed their discontent as a result of these failures. With good reason, of course, because they couldn’t complete even the smallest transaction, whether purchases or sales, on the Solana blockchain.
As a result, these stability concerns are not only inconvenient, but they may also have serious ramifications for investors and traders on this network. Especially when these disruptions continue for many hours, as they have on Solana before.
On the SOL side, similar disruptions have happened recently.
Indeed, while it would be dishonest to claim that these malfunctions are common on the Solana blockchain, it is worth noting that this is not the first time this has occurred.
A comparable occurrence occurred just a few months ago, in January 2022. It resulted in an 18-hour outage of the blockchain. The same thing will happen in September 2021, but with a 5 p.m. break.
The causes of each of these outages were likewise tied to a significant number of transactions, particularly bots.
Could these disruptions harm Solana’s ascent in NFTs?
If you are even remotely interested in NFTs, you are aware that Solana plays an important role in this context since it is the second most popular blockchain for NFTs, behind Ethereum.
However, the distance between the two is rather vast, and many people believe that this sort of failure will not work in Solana’s favor, and may even expand the gap between the two.
Indeed, these errors cause many people to lose trust in Solana, which is helpful for Ethereum since it lets it further establish itself as the number one blockchain for NFT.
This point of view, however, has to be qualified. Despite these incredibly tight breakdowns, Solana is witnessing a sales volume that has been steadily increasing over the last few weeks. Recently, there has been a lot of good news about this blockchain, such as its inclusion in OpenSea.io.
While Solana is still a long way from replacing Ethereum, its potential is enormous, and this blockchain remains a viable option.
