Solana Developers Explain the Network’s Recent Crash

Solana developers have concluded following an investigation that a huge number of incoming transactions and heavy traffic caused Solana’s network to shut down on the night of April 30-May 1.

The network downtime was linked to the activity of bots competing to mint NFTs released using the Candy Machine tool.

The spam transactions arose from the abandonment of the Dutch auction in favor of selling tokens at a fixed price. This created an incentive for users and bots to send huge numbers of transactions in hopes of getting ahead of the competition.

Ultimately, the validators ran out of memory and crashed. The total number of forks the validators had to evaluate exceeded their ability to do so automatically. This led to the need for manual intervention to fix the problem.