Millions of NFT Transactions Clogged Solana, Causing Another Network Outage

Over 4 Million transactions from Solan’s NFT minting bots have brought the network down for seven hours this past weekend. It marked the seventh time the network was down this year due to security issues.

The Seventh Outage of the Year

An unprecedented number of 4 million NFT transactions sent out by bots through Candy Machine, a Solana-based project, collapsed the Solana network again, making validators unable to get transactions through. The network was down for 7 hours – from 8:00 pm UTC on Saturday to 3 am on Sunday – and its services have been fully recovered since then.

According to Metaplex, the bots on their apps were responsible for the crash that extended to the whole Solana network. Metaplex is one of the largest NFT communities on Solana that allows users to launch their own NFT projects.

After identifying such an incident, Metaplex announced that “to combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network.”

Today #Solana mainnet-beta went down partially due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. To combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network. https://t.co/QaAZT3VxXz

— Metaplex (@metaplex) May 1, 2022

Metaplex also said it will implement a 0.01 SOL or $0.89 “penality” charge on wallets that try to process invalid transactions, categorized as “typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint.” Only this year, the Solana network has undergone seven times of outages as such.

Security Concern

The Ethereum challenger has been under fire for the growing incidents of network instability. Earlier this year, Solana suffered multiple outages, with the most severe one causing the network to be offline for 48 hours. Similarly, it was “excessive duplicate transactions” done by bots that crashed the system. Solana frequently going offline has drawn wide criticism from industry experts and users.

FTX’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) admitted in January that when it came to the Solana network, there was tremendous room for improvement. Despite the network’s recent shortcomings, the FTX boss believed it was still superior to other layer-one chains due to its ability to process more transactions than other major networks combined.