Metaplex Can Solve Solana’s Network Bot Problem And Here’s How

Metaplex can solve Solana’s network bot problem and the developers can go on the offense against the transaction spamming bots so let’s read more today in our latest blockchain news.

Solana’s network crash in April was blamed on botting programs whcih swarmed popular NFT mints. The NFT protocol Maker Metaplex implemented a bot tax and will impose further measures to combat these issues plus Solana which is reworking its own network fees. Amid the rising markets for the Solana NFT collections led by projects such as Degods, Okay Bears, also came under attack from malicious programs used to unfairly game new NFt launches on the blockchain which ended up crashing the entire network.

Oh fuck. Solana Foundation published beta cluster restart instructions that include instructions to block NFT minting bots manually at the L1 layer.

🫣

“Don’t forget, only censor the network until it looks steady again so we can start saving face with an online network.” https://t.co/LDpSuunbzt pic.twitter.com/BF6wuZDE9I

— Hudson Jameson (@hudsonjameson) May 1, 2022

These programs sent an automated barrage of transactions which is 6 million per second which overwhelemd the blockchain network and they did so while trying to beat out the legitimate users in the minting process where collectors purchase newly generated NFT collectibles from the project. The bots swarmed Candy Machine which is a minting tool for the Solana NFT protocol Metaplex and took down the entire network in the process. Solana became unusable and caused a mad scramble among validators to diagnose the issue and bring the network back online and took seven hours to restore services to Solana.

The rise of NFTs that is used to show ownership over digital assets like collectibles is what drove the interest to platforms like Ethereum, and Solana over the past year. Ethereum has the biggest such ecosystem yielding billions in trading volume each month and Solana is gaining traction. Solana NFTs yielded $295 million per the data from DappRadar and marked a 91% month-over-month jump. Solana saw over $2.2 billion worth of FNT trading volume to date and the rising market seems to be driving major user and developer activity to the platform.

Metaplex’s botting penalty charges programs a fee for submitting invalid transactions. Before the implementation, there was no real downside to people that use botting programs and flood Candy Machine to buy new NFTs and more users. If a bot sent out 100,000 transactions during the NFT mint and it managed to mint 100 NFTs from completed transactions and there will be a penalty for the other 99,900.

Today #Solana mainnet-beta went down partially due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. To combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network. https://t.co/QaAZT3VxXz

— Metaplex (@metaplex) May 1, 2022

Metaplax protocol changes can help make Solana more efficient in another way. The update can enable validators to process and validate these transactions. According to Phan, the malicious botting in NFT mints on Solana has gone down by the order of magnitude but the SOL tally shows that some botters are trying to game the system still.