Approximately 4 million inbound transactions per second caused the network to exceed 100gbps.
Block Production on Solana Halted
Solana network was taken down by bots as Non-Fungible Token (NFT) demand overspilled across an array of protocols on the same day.
According to Solana, the Mainnet Beta lost consensus on May 1, after a large volume of inbound transactions (4M per second) flooded the network exceeding 100 Gbps. The recent incident affected several protocols built on Solana for as many as seven hours.
Metaplex, aSolana ecosystem, reported that the Solana mainnet-beta was down partially due to bot activity on their Candy Machine program used by new Solana NFT projects to launch their collections. As part of an effort to stabilize the network, Metaplex has merged and deployed a botting penalty to the program to combat the effects of botting.
“In this change, a 0.01 SOL penalty will be collected when a wallet attempts to complete an invalid transaction, which is typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint,” Metaplex expressed in a Twitter thread. “In addition, the Metaplex Foundation will continue to invest heavily in evolving the Candy Machine program to discourage botting in support of creators and collectors.”
Additionally, Strata Protocol took to Twitter to explain the outage. As Strata points out, public NFT mints have economics that encourages bots as the competition gets intense to get these NFTs. If a bot submits millions of transactions, it stands a better chance of winning than an average consumer, halting the network in the process.
However, a validator coordinating through the Solana discord later sent the operators a Google doc containing instructions for restarting the cluster at 131973970. Following the 7-hour halt, validator operators resumed Mainnet Beta at 3:00 AM UTC following the recent network disruption.
The Solana network has faced multiple difficulties so far this year. According to Solana’s tracker, the network experienced multiple partial outages during January.
Source : web3wire.news
