Earlier this week the Solana (SOL) network began dropping transactions at a rapid rate. At one point, as many as 60% of all transactions on the network were failing, equating to over 2000 transactions every second.
“Just switch it off already!”, pleaded Bitcoin Association member Roy Murphy in a tweet posted yesterday, December 15th.
Solana has emerged as one of the more serious Ethereum-contenders of 2021 but a network failure of this degree will undoubtedly leave users shaken. So what actually happened?
SolChicks Hype?
Initial reports suggested the Solana network was enduring a prolonged Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This type of attack floods a network with thousands of useless requests, creating mass congestion and slowing the network down to a halt.
Other reports suggest that the hugely popular NFT play-to-earn game SolChicks caused congestion as people scrambled to trade NFTs on the platform.
Game Demo, token launch — What's all the hype about @SolChicksNFT ? #sponsored #playtoearn #P2E $CHICKShttps://t.co/jkG5B0K8yM
— Play to Earn Online Magazine (@PlayToEarn) December 15, 2021
The Solchicks ‘Initial DEX Offering’ (IDO) which began in late November has allegedly drawn so much interest it caused Solana’s Raydium DEX to crash. A similar event happened earlier this year in September when Grape Protocol launched an IDO on the network.
However, Solana co-founder Raj Gokal as slated the claims of a network outage, saying “slightly slower for a little while” doesn’t equate to “crashed and critically flawed”. Gokal claims the rumors were spread by “Two people who wanted their 15 minutes of fame”, although he doesn’t specify who these people were.
Despite the FUD, Solana hasn’t suffered any significant losses, only briefly falling to a low of $151 before recovering it’s losses. SOL currently sits at around $180 and looks set to test $200 again soon.
