Solana Suffers Seven-Hour Outage As NFT Demand Spills Over

(Bloomberg) -- The Solana blockchain is recovering after going dark in a seven-hour outage, caused by a significant rush of bots trying to mint nonfungible tokens on the crypto network.

An NFT minting program for Solana called Candy Machine struggled under a tsunami of traffic from bots seeking to push through transactions late Saturday, which caused Solana's mainnet to fall out of consensus and crash as nodes belonging to validators collapsed under the weight. Validators are computers that verify transactions to maintain the integrity of the blockchain.

Developers and engineers from the Solana Foundation and Jump Crypto said the traffic reached a record-breaking high of 4 million transactions per second at around 8 p.m. in London on Saturday. On Sunday morning, validators had successfully completed a cluster restart and the Solana network was operating at degraded performance as nodes slowly came back online.

While Solana's rise to the upper echelon of crypto's top alternatives to Bitcoin and Ethereum has been rapid, the influx of bots and stability concerns meant this was not even its longest outage in recent months. The digital asset's network suffered a wave of blackouts and service issues lasting as long as 18 hours in January, prompting ire from frustrated traders who watched their portfolio values decline while unable to offload tokens.

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Overnight, the price of Solana's SOL token fell as much as 7.4% to $83.90, data on Bloomberg show. It was down about 2% as of 6:54 a.m. in New York on Sunday, but is still trading 66% below its all-time high of $259 recorded back in November.

Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko applauded the network's validators for working together so quickly in a tweet following the outage, saying he had been in transit while the chaos unfolded. “It's amazing to see so many new folks step up and lead and take ownership of recovery,” he added.

In a tweet reposted by a Solana Twitter account monitoring the network's status, Candy Machine operator Metaplex said it now plans to deploy a 0.01 SOL ($0.89) penalty that will incur whenever a wallet attempts to complete an invalid transaction, “which is typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint”. The creator of that Candy Machine will be given discretion on how to use funds collected from such penalties.

Solana wasn't the only part of the cryptosphere that struggled under the weight of demand for NFTs at the weekend. Demand for digital land in an unreleased metaverse game by Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs was so high on Saturday that it caused transaction fees on the underlying Ethereum network to skyrocket, meaning it temporarily cost more to mint an NFT than to buy a land parcel.

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Developers in Solana's technology-focused Discord server said wallets attempting to complete SOL transactions may still experience issues for several hours until the network becomes stable again. Austin Federa, the Solana Foundation's head of communications, reassured investors that funds remained safe during the blackout.