Solana Reckons With Seven-Hour Outage After Bot Swarm

When Solana’s prices skyrocketed last summer, the period became known around the internet as Solana Summer. It’s only May, but Solana Spring 2022 is off to a shaky start.

On April 30 at 4:00 PM EST, Solana’s network went down for seven hours due to a swarm of bots trying to mint NFTs at 4M transactions per second. Solana’s mainnet beta fell out of consensus and the validator network was unable to recover. 

SOL Prices Tank

Spammers use bots to scoop up highly desired NFTs.  “If a bot submits 10mm transactions they have a much better chance at getting through than the average consumer. In fact, the consumer has no chance,” explains Strata Protocol, a platform for launching Solana-based social tokens.   

Although Solana’s Head of Communication Austin Federa assured users that their funds are safe, SOL prices still dropped significantly. After the network went down, SOL prices plunged 15% to $82. Since then they have climbed back to $88 in mid-day trading New York time.

Solana gained heighted interest this year for being faster than Ethereum with significantly cheaper fees. The chain was integrated into OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace, at the end of March.

Bouyed by the OpenSea deal,there’s been increasing interest in Solana-based NFTs. Last week, the Solana-based NFT project DeGods bought a basketball team the league run by the crypto-loving entertainer Ice Cube.

Prior to the crash on April 30, DeGods was at a 309 SOL floor (~$30,000) with over 394,800 SOL (~$38.3M) in trading volume.  Before the crash, another Solana-based project called Okay Bears was at a 180 SOL floor (~$17,500) with 503,000 SOL ($48.8M) in trading volume. On the morning of May 2, DeGods floor stood at a 315 SOL (~$27,000) while the Okay Bears floor fell to a 104.5 SOL floor ($~9,000).

Okay Bear #2965