🍬 Let's Talk About Bots, Baby

GM and welcome to SOL Sweet, your goofy friend who keeps you up to date with all things Solana. This week:

• Bots take down Solana for 7 hours

• Quick hits

• A little Friday alpha

• And a little more Friday alpha

All in a brisk 2 minutes and 38 seconds 👇

Bots take down Solana for 7 hours

"Ah, Houston, we have a problem."

That's what I imagine Solana devs were saying to each other Saturday after discovering the network crashed for 7 hours.

TL;DR:

1. Bots swarmed the network to the tune of 6 million transactions per second

2. The network got out of sync trying to process all the transactions

3. When it realized it couldn't keep up it stopped producing blocks to protect itself

4. In simple terms we call this a crash

OK, so why didn't they just turn it back on?

Well they did. But it required 80% of the validators coordinating a cluster restart. That's about 600 validators, if you were wondering.

I dunno about you, but if I need to react to a bot attack at 4:30pm on a Saturday I'm gonna need some time to compose myself.

This tweet offers a deeper dive into what happened and how they got the network going again:

The sweet take - not a great look for a blockchain that has pinned it's whole foundation on being a fast network able to handle a high number of transactions.

And it's not the first time an increase in network volume has caused issues. We've seen TPS (transactions per second) slow down considerably at times due to congestion in the last few months.

There are plans in place to address these issues, which is a must if Solana is to live up to the hype.

Quick check - still bullish? Hell yeah!

Quick hits

These were the top 7 dApps on Solana in April.

What is Solana? A deep dive for beginners.

How Solana devs plan to make the network more robust.

A little Friday alpha

This newsletter will always be about more than just NFTs.

But we can't deny them as a big part of Solana.

So when @SolCoyote drops his weekly Solana video on an upcoming NFT project, we drop everything and dive in.

Watch the video here.

And if you recognize the hype, dive deeper with this podcast episode featuring the founder.

I was surprised to hear the founder is 34.

I was not surprised to hear he has a background in entertainment events in the real world.

There's definitely some key aspects to creating a successful project in real life and in web3.

Look out for a deeper dive on that next week 👀

And a little more Friday alpha

I found this gem of a tweet from @degenbetty this week.

Betty is awesome and a must follow on Twitter. She:

• Works as a crypto product manager

• Was talking about and sharing content on StepN back in February

• Bought an Okay Bear at 38 SOL and still probably made a 2-3x gain

• Created her own DAO and has a badass team of alpha hunters and all around great community

So when she shares some alpha like this, you know she's done her research.

What I like about the project is the real life use case. They're building a platform for web2 companies to enter web3 via Solana.

And the beauty of NFTs is you can buy into the project at an early stage and benefit from every web2 company they launch onto Solana.

These are the type of projects that get me really excited about the possibilities of Solana and web3.

Disclaimer: none of this is financial advice. Always do your own research. I'm just here to learn all about Solana and share interesting news and finds. What you do with that info is up to you.

Ok that's all from me. Hit reply and tell me what you're keeping your eye on. Or if it sucked, tell me why.

And share this with that friend who should be keeping up with Solana. It'll only take about 10 seconds to hit forward, type their name, and send. Thanks!

- Toby (@TenderKiwi)