03/05/2022 Solana Goes Dark for 7 Hours as Bots Swarm ‘Candy Machine’ NFT Minting Tool

It wasn’t immediately clear how the bot traffic overcame network safeguards.

Solana stakeholders rushed to right the network Saturday night after what one insider called “insane amount of data” flooded theproof-of-stakechain, knocking validators out of consensus and grinding block production to a halt.

Bots had swarmed the popular non-fungible token (NFT) minting tool known as Candy Machine earlier Saturday with an unprecedented tsunami of inbound traffic: four million transaction requests and 100 gigabits of data every second – a record for the network, one person at the Solana Foundation said.

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For reasons not yet clear, this swarm pushed validators out of consensus. Block production became impossible and the network went dark at 4:32 p.m. ET. By 11 p.m. ET, validators (coordinating through Solana’s Discord channels and aGoogle doccreated by one of the validators) restarted the cluster at slot 131973970.

Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who said he was traveling during much of the fracas, credited the validator community for spearheading mainnet recovery. He'd caughtflakon Twitter Saturday for allegedly being "MIA" during a network crisis.

Unlike lastSeptember’s17-hour outage, Saturday’s hard fork restart did not resolve with new-and-improved code populating across the validators. It simply picked up where the network flopped seven hours prior.

In preparing for the restart validators mulled whether to implement code that would temporarily block Candy Machine transactions. Some debated in the Discord whether such a move constituted censorship. Regardless, it would only be effective if two-thirds of validators opted in. Few appeared to do so on Saturday night.

Other parts of the ecosystem quickly moved to bolster their defenses. At 11:36 p.m. ET, Metaplex, the key steward of Solana NFT infrastructure and one closely intertwined with Candy Machine,tweetedit would soon deploy a 0.01 SOL “botting penalty” to help NFT projects stanch excessive traffic.

Solana ecosystem services like Phantom wallet and decentralized exchange Mango Markets struggled to stand up in the aftermath as RPC node providers plodded back online.

The outage contributed to a bloody, albeit brief, drawdown in SOL markets. Solana’s native token crashed to a 24-hour low of $83.13 about three hours into the outage before climbing back toward $89, according to CoinGecko.

Solana core developers have yet to diagnose what went wrong Saturday or how the apparent botting attack overcame existing safeguards to stymie consensus, a member of the foundation told CoinDesk.

Arts

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/05/01/solana-goes-dark-for-7-hours-as-bots-swarm-candy-machine-nft-minting-tool/

Interesting NFTs
Everlasting
Flying high in uncharted skies, looking down, loneliness rises like a fortress crumbles over the centuries, between the old and the vestiges of the future that fades and is forgotten, only the red rock remains indomitable above the clouds that erode the dreams of a castaway of the imagination. An unclaimed place to sleep away from damaged dreams.
Block Chain Dungeon
Once upon a time... a little boy named Leo loved to paint, draw and experiment. He also loved to play with blocks and chains, which drew him again and again into the rooms of his friends Michel and Angelo. Often they also met in virtual rooms of Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, Somnium Space or Sandbox to create new inventions, read books about new technologies, or just swing the brushes. But on this day something gigantic happened. A good friend of Leo came to visit and brought his girlfriend Mona, who wanted a piece of Leo's art on her skin. This was the birth of the NFT's, as Leo developed Non Fungible Tattoos in the Block Chain Dungeon of Michel and Angelo. From that day on people from all over the world came to get NFT's from Leo or one of his students, like "Skeenee the rat", who controls the NFT machine with his laptop. A new age began.
The Scion
A young figure caught in a moment of distraction, aware only ephemerally of his unconscious being, as it engages in psychological and psychedelic layer spaces. His right arm casually cradles a moray eel; the figure is comfortable but not truly aware of the potentials for danger in such negligence. His shirt reads “Bello” in Pokemon style font, harkening back to a childhood straddling the millennial threshold. To his right side, out of the unconscious deep, shrouded alien heads propagate as a fractal totem, each new iteration a more sophisticated rendering of emotional masking over the cold mystery of the greys. As the scion of the Budgie-Sattva, the young man, in his distraction, is also simultaneously aware of higher levels of self discovery. To his left a psychological topology sets beneath the oracle side of an 8 ball ,hovering; its message a purest concept of acceptance. The “Scion” lettering is in 80’s HeMan style bold declaration. The lower right side of the painting is like a hybrid of melon, feathers, and seeds. The crystals in the background bring light; conducted, refracted, reflected, and dispersed, to balance the dark shadow of the figure’s physical body. The aura of the scion succeeds in layers to point, with a finger, and the crown chakra, toward a center of a mandala existing as nigh pure application of strokes, in essence painterly abstraction, but also revealing hints of the Aura of migraine, and the bi-hemispherical nature of the brain–noting concerns of the possibility of inherited mental disease. Yet the flourish of chakra as it sets against that center is robust, active, coherent, and reveling against all fear. Fundamentally, the piece speaks to the activation of one’s potential to begin to “Know Thyself”, and find greater awareness out of the enigmas of the mind–as an inculcated seed given to the rich soil of one’s own birthright.
#86719
By OthersideDeployer
Marinalandia
The aquatic world in a world to observe, to recreate, like the glacial landscapes. Both are a planet within ours, full of colors in the tropical case or minimalist in the glacier case, with strange species and wonderful animals each in its environment. This visual toy brings you a piece of that world in a fantastic setting.