Solana (SOL) has had a bad night. The network went offline after a project on the network was attacked by a swarm of bots. Solana eventually went off the air for 7 hours.
Solana attacked via NFT tool
The attack point for the bots was Candy Machine, a tool that allows non-fungible tokens (NFT) can be made. The bots reportedly triggered as many as four million transactions per second. In the end, the network could no longer handle the pressure, causing the validators no consensus could achieve more. The creation of new blocks was forced to stop.
“Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus after a massive amount of inbound transactions (4 million per second) flooded the network, exceeding 100 bps. Developers are still investigating why the network failed to recover and validator operators are preparing for a reboot.”
Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus after an enormous amount of inbound transactions (4m per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100gbps. Engineers are still investigating why the network was unable to recover, and validator operators prepare for a restart.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) May 1, 2022
And that restart was finally realized at 5 o’clock this morning. This means that the network has been restarted from the point where it went wrong. It was briefly considered to exclude Candy Machine through the reboot, but soon the Solana community came to the conclusion that this would be censorship.
Solana does it again, Candy Machine solves problem
So Solana is doing it again and Candy Machine has also ensured that it cannot happen again. It has a botting penalty set up to prevent bots from performing numerous trades.
It is not the first time that Solana was off the air, by the way. At the beginning of this year it was hit it once after a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Shortly afterwards, the network experienced problems again. The problems, which unfortunately occur more often, are cause for strong criticism. For example, at the end of last year, Cyber Capital’s CIO said that Solana “fundamental design flaws” has.
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