- Solana stopped after a flood of network activity caused a cascading failure of the blockchain validator
- Ethereum gas prices soared as Ape DAO members attempted to build NFT parcels at the proposed boring Ape Yacht Club Metaverse.
The two outstanding smart contract platforms each experienced performance issues on Saturday after a temporary transaction outage due to high traffic demand from NFTs.
The Solana blockchain has stopped — again — and had to be restarted. Ethereum continued unabated, but the cost of block space soared to levels not seen since 2020.
The main causes of the outage were the same (heavy traffic), but the source of demand and the response of each network to it were quite different.
Solana was completely offline — no blocks were generated — about 8 hours status.solana.comResume operation only after network validator execution “Restart the cluster”.
The outage “blind mint” NFTs (non-fungible tokens) due to extreme congestion due to the activity of special bots or automated software programs and immediately tried to resell them in the secondary market. The traffic was so heavy that the network suffered a collapse of consensus. This is a cascading effect that ultimately shuts down the blockchain.
“The reboot is very frustrating, time consuming and upset for SOL supporters, investors and everyone else involved. This worked very well. I considered everything, but this never happened. It wasn’t the desired situation. ” Tweet One Solana validator in a thread Approved by Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs.
Most of these transactions were done through Metaplex. Candy machine Tool Solana-based NFT projects rely on the launch of collections. According to the group.. In response, Metaplex will charge 0.01 SOL for the first time to prevent bots from effectively spamming the network with invalid transactions during mint attempts.
Solana itself currently lacks a toll market to control spam and sudden spikes in traffic, Proposed by Yakovenko In January, his proposal repetition last month.
Solana is also January 2022 For similar reasons, arbitrage and clearing bots are involved, not NFT flippers.Unlike that case, a 10-hour outage September 2021The price of Solana’s SOL tokens is relatively intact, temporarily dropping by about 9% and currently trading at $ 88.16 per piece. Data collected by Blockworks..
Ethereum never stops, but it gets expensive
The Ethereum network has near-perfect uptime records since its inception, but during periods of high demand, blockchain costs can be high due to extreme spikes in transaction fees. That’s what happened with the virtual land sale inspired by Yuga Labs’ latest NFT project, the Bored Ape Yacht Club. other side — Released.
society Called it “Several times the largest NFT mint in history.” As of Monday, there were more than 95,000 lot lots of NFTs. Posted on NFT Marketplace OpenSea The minimum charge is 4.2 ether, or about $ 11,700.
Anyone planning to become a landowner of the Metaverse project (which does not yet exist) must qualify for a whitelist, including registration for the purpose of knowing the customer (KYC), each limited to two NFTs. Was there.However, when they tried to win the virtual real estate swath, Ethereum’s mainnet gas charges reached 8,600. gweiTemporarily transfer the cost of the transaction to thousands of dollars.
The Ethereum toll market is based on supply and demand, Maximum throughput Is about 13 transactions per second, which makes the protocol susceptible to extreme spikes during peak demand.
What’s more, Yuga Labs NFTs lacked routine skills to minimize gas usage requirements. according to Become a Syndicate DAO papper.
“Of course, gas optimization is only part of the equation. We need a better mint mechanism design … the money spent on gas is the money that can go to the builder,” Papper said. Said on twitter Following the event.
64,078 ETH, about $ 180 million, was spent during NFT mint. Data from the Etherscan show..For Ethereum upgrades EIP-1559 Last year, the amount of ether burned showed a modest surge on May 1.
Apart from policies and technical modifications to prevent the so-called “gas war”, the NFT project has the option to move mint to the Ethereum Layer 2 network, including: ImmutableX Or like side chains Polygon PoS chain.
Deliver the day’s top crypto news and insights to your inbox every night. Subscribe to Blockworks’ free newsletter now.
