Will Solana Ever Be Usable Again?

All About The Network Congestion and NFT Minting Bots.

Solana has experienced multiple outages so far this year, bringing the chain to a complete halt, or severely impacting the number of transactions that can be processed.

We’re 7 months into the “NFT Bots ruining the chain” issue and it looks like a solution is slowly starting to present itself.

UPDATE: It’s now been a month since this article was written and the answer is — not yet.

As for today — 19th of May 2022 — the network is operating at a fraction of its potential, is highly congested and many transactions constantly reversed.

But how did the situation ever get so bad? And more importantly, how come no one saw this one coming? Low fees AND easy NFT deployments? Bots and exploits are the first thing that should come to mind.

Solana NFT minting bots

Metaplex, an integrated NFT ecosystem offers of out-of-the-box solutions for creating NFTs and even entire NFT marketplaces with quick and easy deployments.

When the barriers to entry are so low, and the cost of minting an NFT on Solana is only 0.05 SOL — it is easy to understand why an ecosystem like this might be exploited.