How Solana Was Brought Down By This dApp Launch

Solana has been taking market share out of Ethereum across several sectors. The platform has seen the expansion of its NFT based projects with SolChicks, one of its latest on-chain games with a play-to-earn (P2E) model, causing a lot of hype amongst the users.

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The game was built with SolChick, one of Solana’s NFT Collections, and let players take their assets and using as their main characters. Launched with a Player-to-Player (PvP), a Gameplay with raids characteristics, SolChicks has set out to “revolutionize the industry”.

The hype around this Solana project translated into a slowdown in the network’s activity as too many users tried to access the platform via Raydium and Solana, the blockchain backing the launch, and crashed it. The team behind the project posted the following via their Twitter account after its problematic token generation event (TGE):

We apologize for the inconvenience of this delay, but tens of thousands of people are trying to buy $CHICKS and the Raydium server has crashed. It appears SolScan is also not loading our contract address right now either.

The team behind the project tried to fix the issue while, according to the official post, working on deploying a liquidity pool that will support the game and its GameFi model. As revealed pre-launch, users need to claim their SolChicks.

The increasing demand for SolChicks and the platform’s native token CHICKS, caused Solana to congest. Thus, slowing down transactions in the network and the users’ capacity to claim and transact with these digital assets.

The team behind SolChicks called the event a “record breaking launch” and transferred the responsibility on the event to Solana:

The token claiming dashboard has crashed, as the Solana network is extremely congested. We’ve had tens of thousands simultaneous claims and buys and there simply isn’t enough capacity in the network. This is something that is completely out of our hands, and rests solely with the Solana network.

In the coming day, the team behind SolChicks prepares to airdrop their tokens for the users that meet the requirements. In order to achieve this objective and contribute with reducing congestion levels on the Solana network, the team is currently creating a plan.

In addition, the team warned users about potential fake and scam accounts and addresses looking to use the project’s popularity for personal gains. Finally, they added the following as a special message to the community:

Once again, we sincerely apologise for the hiccups on launch day. No one likes or wants these holdups; however you can rest assured that our entire team is working around the clock to actively rectify these issues, including liaising with Solana and Raydium directly.

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As of press time, Solana (SOL) trades at $151 with a 13.1% correction in the past day.