Understanding the Outage

This past Saturday, the Solana network suffered its seventh outage, which lasted over seven hours. The culprit? A surge in transaction volume driven by NFT minting bots wreaking digital havoc. Instead of being blamed on the ever-looming DDoS attacks, this particular fail was caused by bots exploiting the well-known Candy Machine application designed for launching NFT collections.

Transaction Volume Hits New Heights

At the peak of the chaos, the network faced a staggering six million transactions per second! That’s right, individual nodes were drowning in data packets flowing at an incredible 100 Gbps. Talk about a digital traffic jam! What followed was a catastrophic event where validators ran out of data memory and subsequently lost consensus.

Three Steps Toward Resilience

The official outage report includes a game-plan for improvement — three key mitigation steps have been identified to bolster the network’s stability:

• Switching Protocols: Transition from the current User Datagram Protocol (UDP) to Google’s highly efficient Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC). Think of QUIC as UDP’s faster, smoother counterpart, with added perks for flow control.
• Stake-Weighted Transaction Processing: Ditching the first-come-first-serve approach, the developers are opting for transaction processing based on stake weight. This means users with greater stakes will get priority, leading to a more robust network.
• Fee-Based Execution Priority: Let’s face it, sometimes money talks. Users will have the option to prioritize their transactions by adding an additional fee on top of the standard charge. This measure is set for the v1.11 release.

A Mysterious Instruction Controversy

As if the outage wasn’t enough, a rather juicy rumor circulated regarding beta cluster restart instructions supposedly issued by validator operators. These instructions suggested that validators block NFT minting bots at the layer-1 level. But hold your horses! Solana’s communications lead, Austin Federa, clarified that these instructions were not from the Solana Foundation, and that very few validators were on board with the censorship move.

The Path Forward

While the network emerged from its slumber early Sunday morning, adjustments are already in the works to tackle the drama caused by NFT bots. With potential updates to Candy Machine offering enhanced anti-bot features, Solana aims to stabilize its turbulent waters. Let’s hope future weekends aren’t as eventful!