Over 77% of Solana governance participants voted in favor of giving validators the full priority fee amount per transaction.

Solana validators are set to get a little more SOL tokens after a governance proposal to give them 100% of priority fees was passed late Monday with 77% in favor, governance data shows.

Validators are important participants in a blockchain network as they run software to confirm transactions and maintain security. Solana priority fees are additional fees users can pay to increase the likelihood of their transactions being processed more quickly by the network.

In the previous model, half of the fees in a priority transaction were erased while the other half went to the validators. This created a situation where validators were said to be making “side deals” with transaction submitters to get more SOL, as per proposal creator tao-stones on the Solana governance forum.

Giving all the priority fees to the validators would ensure that validators are more focused on keeping the network safe and running smoothly, tao-stones said.

The proposal is part of Solana Improvement Document number 96 (SIMD-0096) and has now been put into action with a feature called “Reward full priority fee to validators #34731.

SOL is up 1.6% in the past 24 hours, trading at $166 in Asian afternoon hours on Tuesday, as per CoinGecko.

The post Solana Validators to Get More SOL as Fee Proposal Passes in Favor appeared first on Crypto Insider.

The Madlads NFT is meant to be the first in a novel spin on digital collectibles from Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver, two well-known figures in the Solana ecosystem.

One of the hottest NFT mints in Solana’s recent history is getting pushed into Friday after a groundswell of interest in the Madlads collection broke the internet infrastructure behind it.

The Madlads collection – a project closely tied to the growing realm of Solana duo Armani Ferrante and Tristan Yver – will open to public minters at 7 p.m. ET (23:00 UTC) Friday, an account tied to the supercharged non-fungible token (NFT) project tweeted late Thursday.

Delaying nearly 24 hours could buy Madlads’ creators time to solve a problem they didn’t think to expect: way too much internet traffic. “Billions” of requests routed through the crypto wallet Backpack (itself a production from Ferrante and Yver) outpaced the platform’s abilities, effectively resulting in a DDoS attack.

“This is orders of magnitude more insane than anything we’ve dealt with up until this point,” Ferrante said on a Twitter spaces with about 9,500 listeners, explaining why the mint was being pushed back.

New kind of NFT

The delay came after a day of electric interest in Ferrante’s and Yver’s custom take on NFTs. They’re called xNFTs, and they’re more than just a JPEG on a blockchain: They also represent “tokenized code representing ownership rights over its execution,” according to the website of Blue Coral Inc., the duo’s startup that focuses on Solana development.

Madlads is meant to be the first xNFT.

On the Twitter spaces, Ferrante recounted a cascading series of internet outages that restricted the public’s chance to access the mint, first for an hour, then a day. He said heavy demand knocked out two RPC nodes (access points to the Solana blockchain) and also the user interface on Cloudflare, which, among other things, tries to prevent DDoS attacks.

Popular demand for the collection of novel JPEGs has already likely spelled a signup boom for Coral’s wallet app, Backpack. That’s the only Solana wallet where would-be owners can mint the Madlads collection, and also the only wallet that supports it, given market leader Phantom isn’t playing.

The palpable excitement among Solana’s developer community manifested in unexpected ways as NFT traders searched for any edge that might guarantee them access to the collection.

Some desperate seekers even followed the advice of a Substack post that implied, erroneously, that buying into custom RPC nodes from Solana developer project Helius could benefit would-be minters.

The signups to Helius’ $19.99 “Hacker plan” grew so much Thursday that it prompted CEO Mert Mumtaz to ward off the ill-informed.

“While I appreciate you thinking of us, it’s important to understand that this RPC won’t actually increase your chances of minting a Madlad all that much, if at all,” Mumtaz posted in Helius’ Discord server midday Thursday.

The post Heavy Demand for Madlads NFT Breaks Internet, Delays Mint appeared first on Crypto Insider.

Bitcoin dumped Thursday on the back of multiple catalysts that contributed to selling pressure.

Selling pressure on bitcoin (BTC) contributed to a broader market drop as tokens of some of the largest blockchains fell as much as 6% in Asian morning hours on Thursday.

Bitcoin dipped under $22,000 during European hours on Wednesday, even as broader traditional markets remained relatively unchanged. Ether (ETH) shed over 2%. Among other large-caps, solana (SOL) and matic (MATIC) fell 6% in the past 24 hours, while Uniswap’s UNI and Avalanche’s AVAX fell 4% in the same period.

Artificial intelligence-focused tokens The Graph (GRT) and SingularityAI (AGIX) fell as much as 8%, paring gains from a month-long rise. Curve ecosystem tokens curve (CRV) and convex (CVX) fell 7%, while gaming-focused ImmutableX (IMX) dropped over 12%.

The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI), a broad-based index designed to measure the market capitalization-weighted performance of the crypto market, fell 1.2%.

Toncoin (TON) bucked the trend, rising 6% in the past 24 hours on no immediate catalysts. Shiba Inu (SHIB) rose 2.2%, buoyed by the upcoming beta launch of Shibarium, its native blockchain.

As such, the market-wide decline came as crypto-friendly Silvergate Bank said it will “voluntarily liquidate” its assets and wind down operations of its holding company, Silvergate Capital Corp. (SI).

Elsewhere, CoinDesk reported that U.S. banking giant JPMorgan (JPM) is ending its banking relationship with Gemini.

Meanwhile, the drop in prices caused over $100 million in liquidations in the past 24 hours, data from analytics tool Coinglass shows. Slightly over 85% of these liquidations were on short positions, or from traders betting on falling prices.

Over $70 million worth of those figures occurred on bitcoin and ether futures alone.

Liquidations occur when traders borrow funds from exchanges to bet on crypto prices using a relatively smaller initial capital, one that is forfeited when prices reach a predetermined liquidation level.

The post Polygon, Solana Lead Majors Slide Amid Bitcoin Weakness appeared first on Crypto Insider.

Solana co-founder said last week’s 1.14 network update has raised concerns about maintaining stability during major updates.

Solana Labs will make improvements to its software upgrade process to ensure network reliability and uptime, co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said on Tuesday.

“Delivering a fast, reliable and scalable network in order to move toward a better, decentralized web remains a top priority,” Yakovenko said. “The issues around last week’s 1.14 network update – which focused on improvements for speed and scale – made it clear how maintaining stability during these major updates remains a challenge.”

Yakovenko said last week’s 1.14 network update had raised concerns about maintaining stability during major updates.

Prior to the 1.14 release, core engineers were working on fixing problems that were impacting the network’s speed and usability, such as invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions, and lack of fee markets, among other more technical issues. These issues were prioritized to improve user experience.

But following the latest release, core engineers plan to bring in additional external developers and auditors to test and find exploits. They will also form an adversarial team comprising almost a third of the Solana Labs core engineering team.
The core engineers will continue supporting external core engineers, including Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team, which is building a second validator client.

Additionally, core engineers plan to improve the restart process by making nodes automatically discover the latest confirmed slot and share the ledger with each other if it is missing. Solana Labs and third-party core engineering teams have been working to improve the network over the past year, with a focus on stability.

“For example, Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team is building a second validator client to increase the network’s throughput, efficiency, and resiliency. Mango DAO developers are focused on the tooling needed to build on Solana,” Yakovenko said.

The comments came following a lengthy weekend outage for the Solana blockchain. The problems that started as sluggish transaction processing spiraled into a near-complete shutdown of activity on Solana. Developers said Monday the reason for a network-wide outage over the weekend was still unclear but investigations are ongoing.

The post Solana Will Improve Network Upgrades to Improve Stability appeared first on Crypto Insider.

The Solana blockchain was stuck for more than one day over the weekend, recovering only after validators restarted the network.

Solana developers said on Monday that the reason for a network-wide outage over the weekend was still unclear and that investigations were ongoing.

“At approximately 05:46:16 UTC 2023-02-25, Solana Mainnet Beta suffered a significant performance degradation,” the developers said. “Eventually leading the validator community to opt for a restart of the network. The cause of this is still unknown and under active investigation.”

“Root cause is still unknown and under active investigation,” developers added.

The problems that started as sluggish transaction processing spiraled into a near complete shutdown of activity on Solana, validators and developers told CoinDesk over the weekend.

Users were unable to move any tokens or conduct any transactions during the outage period, before a restart by the network’s validators saw transactions occur again, albeit very slowly.

Market reaction to the halt remained relatively timid. Solana’s native tokens (SOL) fell from $23.50 to just over $21 on Saturday night, before erasing all losses from Sunday to Monday.

Meanwhile, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko dismissed theories of increased network voting as a major cause behind the network outage in tweets on Monday evening.

“Votes aren’t just counted as transactions, they are literally implemented as transactions because there is no cheaper way to do it,” Yakovenko said. “If there was a cheaper way to get votes to all the nodes in the network, then why wouldn’t user transactions also take the cheaper path?”

The post Solana Developers Say Reason For Network Outage Still Unclear appeared first on Crypto Insider.

Solana Spaces will close its New York City and Miami locations by the end of February.

Solana Spaces, a company that used storefronts in New York City and Miami to pitch adoption of its namesake blockchain, said in a Tweet Tuesday it will close its locations by the end of the month.

The startup reached “an inflection point” in the past two months and will pivot away from brick-and-mortar experiences and into NFTs, CEO Vibhu Norby said in the tweet. He indicated Solana Spaces will rebrand itself as DRiP, a boutique NFT distribution platform created by Norby, which he also promoted in his stores.

The closure comes seven months after Norby opened Solana Spaces’ first location in a glitzy mall in New York City’s Hudson Yards. Its staffers guided visitors through interactive stations that taught them how to get going on Solana, from setting up a crypto wallet to swapping tokens on a decentralized exchange. Norby later set up a second shop in Miami.

Some 60,000 total visitors came to the stores over their six months and they completed 16,000 onboarding tutorials, according to a spokesperson for the Solana Foundation, which gave Norby a grant to help Solana Spaces launch. The spokesperson said the Foundation had no financial stake in the company.

Rather than selling a product, Solana Spaces pitched its storefront as an interactive billboard for crypto brands like FTX, Phantom and Orca that paid for exposure to mainstream audiences. Their advertising dollars paid for Solana Spaces operations; when FTX imploded it shook the company, but Norby insisted Solana Spaces could still sustain itself using his so-called “retail-as-a-service” (RaaS) model.

Just over a year ago, Norby’s first attempt at RaaS, the tech gadget-focused store b8ta, closed its doors after failing to reach a deal with its landlords. Solana Spaces’ New York location inhabited a former b8ta storefront.

Norby said he closed Solana Spaces’ brick-and-mortar operations because the behind-the-scenes administrative operations proved too burdensome and the potential for growth was too small.

“It’s a little less about the economics and more about where I thought this was going in the future,” Norby said.

The company will continue building DRiP, the NFT distribution platform which Norby said attracted tens of thousands of sign-ups during Solana Spaces’ in-person run.

The post Solana-Themed Storefronts Close Shop, Ending Experiment in IRL Blockchain Evangelism appeared first on Crypto Insider.

The wireless hotspot network voted to move to Solana in September.

Helium network founder Amir Haleem tweeted his support late Wednesday for the decentralized wireless network’s migration to Solana, the blockchain ecosystem perhaps hardest-hit by FTX’s sudden implosion.

“None of the criteria we used to evaluate the various L1 blockchains has changed from when we proposed HIP70 and now,” he said, referring to the community vote that saw Helium abandon its own blockchain in favor of Solana’s in late September.

The vote of confidence came after a bloody, 24-hour drawdown in crypto markets in which SOL shed over 40% of its value and Helium’s HNT lost 15%. Haleem, CEO of Helium backer Nova Labs, said he was unfazed by the bear market carnage and pledged to continue apace.

Helium is a crypto-powered wireless hotspot network that until recently operated atop its own blockchain. The move to Solana will see it integrate with that far larger network’s big tech gambits, including Solana’s crypto-centric cellphone.

The project has been plagued by accusations of lying about key partnerships and its actual profitability.

The post Helium Network Founder Pledges to Stick with Solana After Bloody Day for SOL appeared first on Crypto Insider.

The decentralized network utilizes the Solana validator to facilitate tasks such as automated payments.

Solana-based network Clockwork has raised $4 million in seed funding to grow its team that’s building a framework to decentralize autonomous tasks on a Solana validator, a component of the computing power behind the ecosystem, the company said Tuesday.

Clockwork, which was formerly known as Cronos, aims to solve the automation dilemma, in which developers must choose between using decentralized apps (dapps), or apps that are automated. Nick Garfield, co-founder of Clockwork, told CoinDesk that his company removes the need for a centralized cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud to provide automated products for blockchains, such as decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) tooling or payments processing.

Others have also tried to solve the automation dilemma. In August 2019, AWS backed a competitive service created by the VDF Alliance, a blockchain software firm, and supported by the Ethereum Foundation to decentralize automated blockchain cloud computing.

Garfield aims to bring this technology to Solana for fast and cheap transactions while prioritizing decentralization. He said his goal is “to rewrite a lot of automation tooling that exists on the cloud service providers and make it work for decentralized internet.”

The round was led by Multicoin Capital and Asymmetric, with participation from Solana Ventures.

The post Solana-Based Automation Network Clockwork Raises $4M in Seed Funding appeared first on Crypto Insider.

Data shows that active wallets using the popular network have grown by over 58% since the start of this year.

Active wallets on the Solana network grew 58% this year, outpacing some other blockchains despite a market-wide price decline.

Figures for “New Daily Addresses” on Solana consistently grew its user base throughout the bear market, research by CoinMarketCap that cited data from Glassnode and The Block showed.

New Daily Addresses refer to first-time wallet users on any blockchain network, which can signal growth and adoption. On Solana, new users peaked at over 400,000 in May before gradually declining to 240,000 users this week. These figures are a jump from December 2021’s levels of 150,000 to 170,000 new users each day.

Daily active wallets have similarly climbed this year, with over 32 million active users in June and 37 million in May. This rose from an average of 20 million active users in the first four months of 2022.

However, data suggests the activity did not amount to inflows. Total value locked (TVL) on decentralized finance (DeFi) applications running on Solana dropped to $2.9 billion this week from May’s $6 billion figure. Solana TVL peaked at $14 billion in December 2021.

Solana’s native SOL tokens have grown amid rising wallet usage. The tokens added nearly 34% over the past week and are up 30% in the past month, despite market-wide declines and volatility. In comparison, bitcoin (BTC) has risen by 14% in the past month.

Meanwhile, CoinMarketCap noted that active addresses on BNB Chain remained flat over an equivalent period, while data on new users on Ethereum showed a decline since the start of this year. “BNBChain has seen its new daily active addresses fall just north of 17.9%. Ethereum is faring worse at 51.8% over the same period,” CoinMarketCap said.

The post Solana’s New Daily Address Growth Outpaces Other Blockchains, SOL Jumps appeared first on Crypto Insider.

Crema Finance developers said they are coordinating with “relevant organizations” to gather more information.

Solana-based liquidity protocol Crema Finance had more than $8.78 million worth of cryptocurrencies stolen from its platform in an attack over the weekend, developers said in a tweet.

Crema said it had suspended its smart contract after the exploit. The protocol allows liquidity providers to set specific price ranges, add single-sided liquidity and conduct range order trading. This makes for a sophisticated and decentralized trading platform.

“We’ve been closely working with several experienced security institutes and relevant organizations to track the hacker’s fund movements,” the developers said in a tweet.

Value locked on Crema plunged to $3 million on Monday from over $12 million on Saturday following the exploit, data shows. Crema has seen trading volumes of $1.34 billion since its inception in January.

The attacker started by creating a fake tick account. A tick account is “a dedicated account that stores price tick data in CLMM,” the developers said, referring to Crema’s market making protocol. After that, the attacker exploited a command by writing the data on the fake account and circumventing security measures.

The attacker then used a flash loan to manipulate the prices of assets on liquidity pools. This, along with the false data entries, allowed the attacker to claim “a huge fee amount out from the pool.”

Flash loans allow traders to borrow unsecured loans from lenders by relying on smart contracts instead of third parties.

The stolen funds were swapped to 69422.9 solana (SOL) and 6,497,738 USD Coin (USDC). The Solana-based USDC was then bridged to the Ethereum network via Wormhole and swapped to 6,064 ether (ETH). These funds amount to over $8.5 million at current prices.

The attacker’s Ethereum address, 0x8021b2962dB803b73Aa874030B0B42c202E8458F as flagged by blockchain scanning tool Etherscan, had not moved the stolen funds or converted to other coins at writing time, the data show.

The post Solana DeFi Protocol Crema Loses $8.8M in Exploit appeared first on Crypto Insider.