Solana blockchain might not be ready for scaling up to its full specification as the SolRazr IDO was canceled in its original form on the request of the Solana Labs team, the official Twitter confirmed on Oct 6. The request for cancellation resulted from the fear that the incoming IDO might cause another large spike in network activity and thus cause a network meltdown and outage, similar to the one experienced on Sep 14, which saw the Solana blockchain go down for around 18 hours.
Announcement regarding SolRazr IDOhttps://t.co/KnAHiVzdJY
TL;DR
This change is not going to affect the IDO timeline or the experience of the user in any way.
Last month, the Solana blockchain encountered “excessive load and memory consumption” resulting in continuous network forks and nodes going offline, starting on Sep 14 and lasting until the next day. The cause at that time was reported to be bots spamming the Grape IDO with a high number of transactions, active at that time. Solana doesn’t appear to have proper resource management and effective protection against DDoS, which are likely to be related to the immensely low cost of executing such an attack.
Now, bots attempting to overwhelm the initial phases of an initial decentralized offering (IDO) isn’t unheard of and regularly happens as the bots try to scoop up as much allocation as possible, selling it later after raising the price. Generally, the probability and extent of bot spamming are directly proportional to a project’s popularity as the exit liquidity for the bots can be reasonably assured. The cost of token acquisition rises for the actual participants and it’s harmful to the fair distribution aim.
SolRazr changed their initial decentralized offering (IDO) model on Solana Lab’s request but didn’t specify as to what changes were made. This didn’t affect the IDO timeline, but only the manner in which it was conducted. However, such types of requests from the developer teams are uncommon and it is surprising to see that the main issue wasn’t fixed, after the last network meltdown, but merely the blockchain was restarted by the validator committee.
The actual statements from the Solana Labs read: Today, Solana Labs requested the SolRazr team to postpone their IDO or change the IDO model as engineers are still working on preparing the Solana network to handle large AMM-style IDOs as part of the 1.7 validator release. While there are no problems with SolRazr’s platform, Solana Labs is concerned that SolRazr’s IDO could create conditions similar to that of the Grape IDO, which caused the network to halt for 18 hours. Our sincere apologies to the SolRazr community for requesting the change.
