Solana Stopped Working Again This Weekend: Here's Why The Blockchain Crashed for 7 Hours

Solana SOL/USD — a high scalability smart contract-enabled blockchain, which many believe to be the Ethereum-killer ETH/USD — saw 7 hours of downtime on Saturday, now investigations have revealed why. This follows the network crashing in mid-September 2021 and January 2022.

What Happened: Solana representatives revealed in a Tuesday blog post that the blockchain — which failed to produce any new blocks for 7 hours on Saturday — was brought down by bots tied to a new non-fungible token (NFT) project.

Blockchain explorers show that on average Solana processes about 2,700 transactions per second, with peaks reaching over 710,000 transactions per second as specified in developer documents. On Saturday — due to the aforementioned bots — the network was asked to handle the impossible, as millions of transactions per second were sent to its nodes for processing.

The network being flooded with 6 million transactions per second coincided with its nodes also surpassing 100 Gbps of traffic at some nodes. As one would expect, this resulted in the network running out of memory and crashing.

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The Aftermath: Developers wrote that "there is no evidence of a denial of service attack, but instead evidence indicates bots tried to programmatically win a new NFT being minted using the popular Candy Machine program."

The fallout resulted in validators running out of memory while trying to clear up transactions in abandoned blocks, and the number of total forks that necessitated evaluation exceeded what the software was able to process. Manual reconciliation of the blockchain was needed.

The bots were attempting to exploit a popular NFT minting program known as Candy Machine and mint tokens. The tokens were sold for a fixed price instead of being won via Dutch auctions, which resulted in an incentive for bots to send a high number of transactions hoping to win the NFTs by pure chance — causing excessive spam on the network.