Cryptocurrencies
Solana Suffers Seven-Hour Outage as NFT Demand Spills Over
- Bots flood network with record-breaking number of transactions
- Latest blackout adds to ongoing Solana stability woes
Solana signage at the NFT LA conference in Los Angeles.
Photographer: Bing Guan/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
The Solana blockchain is recovering after going dark in a seven-hour outage, caused by a significant rush of bots trying to mint nonfungible tokens on the crypto network.
An NFT minting program for Solana called Candy Machine struggled under a tsunami of traffic from bots seeking to push through transactions late Saturday, which caused Solana’s mainnet to fall out of consensus and crash as nodes belonging to validators collapsed under the weight. Validators are computers that verify transactions to maintain the integrity of the blockchain.