Solana Suspected Of Getting A DDoS Attack, Prices Drop By 6.4 Percent!

JAKARTA - Solana's blockchain performance has reportedly been hit by DDoS attacks carried out over the past 24 hours, but their network appears to remain online.

DDoS attacks generally refer to a large number of coordinated devices, or botnets flooding a network with spoofed traffic to take it offline.

Reported by Cointelegraph, this is not the first time Solana has experienced this problem. In September their network experienced a 17-hour blackout due to mass bottling activity for an initial DEX offering (IDO) on Solana's DEX-based platform, Raydium.

The #Solana validator network is experiencing issues this morning. TPS issues as the network works to process txn requests. Remember, this is blockchain 😊 If your txn ID went through then it's not lost, just pending. Growing pains is all! pic.twitter.com/2Zfagq092M

— GenesysGo.sol - Shadowy Super Coder DAO (@GenesysGo) December 9, 2021

The latest DDoS attack was highlighted by Solana-based NFT platform Blockasset on December 9 at around 3pm UTC. They stated:

“We are aware that tokens take a long time to distribute. The Solana chain is being overloaded with DDoS attacks that have clogged the network causing delays."

Solana-focused infrastructure company GenesysGo also reported on the issue, stating that the validator network was having issues with processing transaction requests, but asked for calm as it attributed the issue to "increasing pain."

At this stage, the nature of the incident is unclear as the Solana Foundation has not publicly confirmed any attacks. While Solana Status indicates that the network has not experienced any outages and remains fully operational at the time of writing.

However multiple accounts on Twitter confirmed that Solana was experiencing a global outage, with Verbit CEO Roy Murphy (and BSV supporter) stating that “Solana is down again and is currently offline. Engineer is looking for 'reboot system.' Seriously, you can't make it up!”.

Earlier today member of the r/Solana subreddit linked the network blockage to another launch of IDO on Raydium, with user "u/Psilodelic" writing a post titled "Why is Raydium IDO clogging up Solana's network and what is being done about this?".

“My biggest concern about Solana right now is the performance impact during the high volume activity connected to Raydium IDO and its launch. Literally every performance issue in the last 6 months, including a 17 hour outage, was the result of launching on Raydium,” they wrote as quoted by Cointelegraph.

In response, one of the moderators of the “Laine_sa” group did not explicitly confirm whether Solana's network problems were once again Raydium-related, but noted that there have been “stop gaps” installed to keep Solana online since the DDoS attack in September:

“There is currently a stop-gap in place prioritizing voice transactions to prevent a full crash, there are additional changes to calculating limits and fees associated with this in the works but it's not a quick fix that could roll out in a few weeks. That's why it takes time. But it is being seen. ”

Cointelegraph has reached out to several Solana developers for comment on the DDoS attack, and will update the story if they respond.

According to data from Coingecko, the price of Solana (SOL) has fallen 6.4% over the last 24 hours to $182.79 at the time of writing. Amid the pullback of most of the top crypto assets, SOL has fallen 26.1% over the past 30 days.