Solana Faces Downtime as Bots Invade NFT Minting Tool

0

Last Updated on 1 May 2022 by CryptoTips.eu

Jeroen Kok

Jeroen is one of the lead copywriters on Cryptotips.eu and discusses all recent events in the crypto market. This includes news updates, but also price analyzes and more. He developed his passion for cryptocurrency during the bull run in 2017. He has learned a lot since then. The combination of cryptocurrency and creative writing is perfect for Jeroen and an excellent way to share his knowledge with a wide audience. Find me on LinkedIn / [email protected]
View all posts

The Solana network stopped processing blocks for nearly 7 hours following an attack on the network’s NFT mining tool, Candy Machine. The attack halted the network starting from Saturday around 4:32 pm till around 11 pm EST on Sunday.

According to a tweet on the official Solana network Twitter handle, the network lost consensus after a large number of transactions surpassing 100gbps overwhelmed the network. At the time of reporting, engineers have not been able to find the cause of the network’s inability to recover. Validators are however getting ready for a restart as investigations are ongoing.

Advertentie.

Botting penalty to be administered

Botting (use of botting software) is a serious offence be it in gaming or on a cryptocurrency network like Solana. This is a situation in which an user of the network uses a bot to gain unfair advantage over other users. Botting is used to automate processes that would otherwise be carried out manually by humans.

To correct the problem, Solana developers will deploy a botting penalty program as part of efforts to stabilize the network. This is not the first time Solana network has gone down and block processing suspended though.

The network has experienced a number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the past, the last being in January this year. Like the botting case, the DDoS attack which lasted for approximately 4 hours clogged the network so that it could not run properly as multiple requests were sent to it.

Solana price takes dive following attack

The crypto market has been moving sideways for the past several days. However, the news of the network’s downtime led to a drop in the price of SOL, the network’s native currency. The asset which was trading at over $90 at the time of the attack, dropped as low as $80 on some exchanges within 4 hours of the news.

This was short-lived though, and a recovery started almost immediately. The the 6th largest cryptocurrency by market cap is now trading at over $88, though there is no update on whether the network has been stabilized.