Solana NFT Minting Bots Trigger Seventh Network Outage in 4 Months

Key Insights:

• Metaplex confirmed Solana’s recent outage was caused by botting on the Candy Machine program.
• This is the seventh outage observed by Solana in the last four months.
• Solana NFTs have been noticing a waning interest from investors.

Solana (SOL) is one of the biggest decentralized finance (DeFi) chains in the world, built with the capabilities of creating and selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the chain itself. Combine that with the growing craze for NFTs in the last few months, and it’ll bring us to where the network is today.

Solana faces another outage

In a confirmation on Twitter, Solana stated that the most recent outage, which hit the mainnet on April 30 and lasted for seven hours into May 1, had been corrected yesterday morning, after validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta.

Metaplex explained this to be the result of botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. In order to deal with this, the NFT minting platform deployed a penalty of 0.01 SOL worth approximately $0.87, as per Solana’s trading price of $87, at the time of writing.

Metaplex further justified this penalty stating:

“Botting penalties that are collected will be given to the config account for the Candy Machine instance. The creator of the Candy Machine will then have discretion on how to use the funds collected from these penalties. 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.”

As mentioned above, this is the seventh time Solana investors have had to suffer from this problem. Back in January, the network was victim to multiple outages due to high usage.

This time around, the need and hype for NFTs apparently caused the outage, which brings us to the current status of NFTs on Solana. There was a time when the demand was at its peak, but it has been withering since, which is noticeable in the last month.

Except for a few spikes around mid-April, NFT transactions on a daily basis have plummeted significantly, with the last 24 hours only noting 3,000 NFT transactions down from over 16,000 in March.

 

Solana on the charts

While NFTs are heading in their own direction, downwards, so is Solana’s price, which has observed a 38.17% decline in price since the beginning of April.

Although the altcoin did mark a 6% recovery yesterday, it did not make much of a difference since SOL will have to add $50 to its current price in order to make its investors somewhat happier.