Metaplex Bot Free

    Solana experienced another network downtime due to intense botting of a NFT mint. Solana has been working on a creative solution to deal with this botting issue called Quic, but Metaplex, the infrastructure protocol for Solana NFTs decided to implement a ""bot tax"" to help alleviate this issue.

    Introduction

    The NFT frenzy unleashed a storm on Solana on April 30th when the bot spamming towards Solana's NFT Project, Candy Machine, reached unbearable levels of transactions for the nodes and validators. The reason was a certain NFT which was auctioned on a first come, first serve basis so there was an incentive to spam transactions in the hopes of getting yours through.

    Solana has implemented a bot tax of 0.01 SOL per transaction when transacting with Candy Machine that should not have an impact on human users.

    Let's take a look at the bot tax!

    Solana Outage Report

    Methodology

    Following the hint given in the bounty, the solana.fact_transactions table was queried on the constraint CAST(log_messages as string) ILIKE '%Candy Machine Botting is taxed at%' to identify the bot tax transactions. Using the first signing address with signers[0] as the address identifying the bot, the transactions were aggregated by hour and by address.

    A separate query will shows the top 10 bot addresses by number of transactions.

    Results

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    Figure 1. shows the hourly distribution of bot transactions. The aftermath of the outage still shows some bot spamming activity until May 1st, 3:00 and after May 2nd, the bot activity is drastically reduced.

    A total of 54.4k transactions have been taxed with the bot tax, adding 544 SOL as payment.

    Figure 2. shows the top 10 bot addresses with the higher number of taxed transactions. The top address sent 2520 tx and paid 25.2 SOL in the process.

    Conclusion

    It seems that the implementation of the bot tax has alleviated some of the spamming pressure in this crazy NFT Season in Solana. That being said, I guess with the current market sentiment, there could well be a new bot menace waiting for the next blue chip NFT. Solana will still be stress tested!

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