Solana Faces Seven-Hour Outage After Bots Overwhelm NFT Minting App

Solana is recovering from another outage which is being attributed to a swarm of bots that overwhelmed the Candy Machine, a tool for minting non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

“Block production on Solana Mainnet Beta has halted. Validator operators should prepare for a restart in mb-validators on Discord,” Solana Status said on Twitter.

Solana Status noticed an “enormous amount of inbound transactions,” 4 million to be exact, that flooded the network early Sunday morning.

Metaplex, the NFT platform behind Candy Machine, identified the bots inside the dApp as the main culprit that brought down Solana and announced a course of action to stem the situation and prevent it from happening in the future.

“To combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network.

Candy Machine is used by a majority of new SolanaNFT projects to launch their collections. In this change, a 0.01 SOL penalty will be collected when a wallet attempts to complete an invalid transaction, which is typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint..."

Metaplex said it would be investing heavily to discourage botting in support of creators and collectors.

Contrary to some other reports which described Solana as “halted” or “paused,” Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana, said that a better word for the outage was a “crash.”

As Solana critics are quick to point out, this is far from the first network outage for the smart contract platform.

Most notably, Solana also faced denial of service (DDOS) attacks last January, December, and September, the latter of which resulted in a 17-hour outage.

SOL has dipped on the news, but so has virtually the entire altcoin market as cryptocurrencies continue to weather its multi-month correction.

At the time of writing, SOL is trading at just above the $90 mark, as per CoinMarketCap data.