Recently the crypto market was shocked by two incidents that can be described as a critical situation to assess the sustainability of the network.
The incident is related to NEAR Protocol and Solana.
Although different in terms of durability, but enough to bring a positive impression of one of the networks earlier.
What happen?
Solana (SOL) Paralyzed 7th Time
Solana will probably lose her status as an ‘Ethereum Killer’ soon.
The production of blocks or transactions at Solana was disrupted for 7 hours on May 1 based on Solana Status's official tweet via Twitter:
Block production on Solana Mainnet Beta has halted. Validator operators should prepare for a restart in mb-validators on Discord.
- Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) April 30, 2022
This incident makes it the 7th incident of the year. In January alone, Solana faced the same issue 3 times.
The problem stems from the NFT production (minting) application, Candy Machine which was attacked by a boat that paralyzed Solana.
This bot generates a dumping of transactions to be processed by the blockchain validator but fails because too many transactions are received.
The incident caused the SOL price to fall more than 18%, touching the value of $ 73.88 today.
At the time of writing, SOL is trading at $ 75.61, down more than 2% in 24 hours and over 16% since last week.
Hackers Stuck Trying To Hack NEAR Protocol
The network is different from the others because of successful hacker scams. Eh, is that me?
A week after the launch of the stablecoin algorithm, USN; NEAR Protocol was attacked by hackers via Rainbow Bridge.
Rainbow Bridge is a bridge that connects the NEAR Protocol with Etherum, making it easier for developers to launch decentralized applications (dApps) and Ethereum assets in the Near, and vice versa.
The incident began when a hacker sent a sum of ETH funds from a decentralized exchange platform (DEX), Tornado Cash to create a Rainbow Bridge relayer.
Relayers are important intermediaries for most bridges. For example a relayer for the NEAR Protocol ecosystem ensures that LiteNodes always keeps track of blocks from other networks.
The deposit also aims to produce ‘artificial’ blocks to confuse the NEAR Protocol ecosystem.
The presence of the miner extractable value boat (MEV) successfully blocked the deposit and ‘seized’ 2.5 ETH ($ 6,154.86 / RM26,953.49).
MEV bots are introduced in an ecosystem for the purpose of rearranging, entering and blocking transactions to extract value from blocks.
NEAR Protocol users are not affected by this incident but it is enough to excite the entire crypto community because of its sustainability in tackling hacking.
At the time of writing, NEAR posted a trading value, $ 11.23, up more than 10% in 24 hours but down more than 5% since last week.
From a record daily low on May 8, $ 9.85, NEAR has risen more than 16%, touching a daily high, $ 11.48 today.
If observed, these two incidents are quite significant to each other. However, the presence of MEV is enough to explain how important it is to censor any transaction done for the purpose of a scam or ecosystem damage.
NEAR Protocol has proven its sustainability but Solana is losing its fangs.
Perhaps Solana can find a solution (although it should already be overcome considering it’s the 7th incident) so that her project can survive for a long time and most importantly maintain its status as an ‘Ethereum Killer’.
