Introduction

Four million non-fungible cryptocurrency transactions (NFT) sent by bots through Candy Machine, a solana-based project, have crashed the network, making transactions impossible, according to information from [1].

The network was down for seven hours and the responsibility lies with the bots of their applications. Metaplex is one of the largest NFT communities in the world that allows users to launch their own NFT projects.

After identifying this incident, Metaplex announced that "to combat it, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the programme as part of a broader effort to stabilise the network".

In addition, he said he will implement a "penalty" fee of 0.01 SOL or $0.89 for bitlists that attempt to process invalid transactions, categorised as "typically made by bots that are trying to harvest blindness". This year alone, the Solana network has suffered seven such crashes.

Methodology

In this dashboard, we are gonna analyze how many bot transactions and thus how much SOL has Metaplex captured since the bot tax launch on April 28th. Because of that bots will now have to pay a 0.01 SOL penalty for every transaction, we will only take into account the transactions involving this type of taxes.

In the firt chart, we can see the number of daily transacitons using the Metaplex bot tax. It can be seen how there have been three different important days so far when the amount of transactions surpassed the 40k:

• May 1st (first day)
• May 6th
• May 8th

Until now, the total number of transactions reaches 170k.

In terms of users, something similar occurred. The amount of users using it increased in 2 specific days. In this case, the first day after launch not supposed an impact on this metric but in May 6th and 8th, the amount surpassed the 3k users. Currently, a total of 16k users have used it.

Finally, in terms of daily and cumulative volume captured, it can be seen how the daily amounts are related to the number of transactions due to the tax is fixed to 0.01. Then the 1st, 6th and 8th of May were the most important days in terms of volume captured. The current volume captured is more than 1,7k SOL.

Finally, in this donut we can see the distribution of transactions done by each address. Here we can see the top 10 addresses taking into account the 'Others' section taking into account the rest of the wallets. Intepreting it, we can see how there is not a clear dominant wallet, but the orange one represents more than 2% of the total transactions.

Conclusions

To conclude, in this dashboard we have seen the daily and cumulative transactions, users and deposits captured on Metaplex bot. As well as the distribution of transactions per each different wallet to track if there are some dominance.

The key insights have been the followings:

• The major activity is concentrated on May 1st, 6th and 8th, where all metrics increased in numbers
• The total volume captured is more than 1.7k SOL
• There is no a clear wallets using more the Metaplex bot than others, but we seen the top 10 ones, observing that one of them do more than 2% of the transactions.

Source: Congestió a Solana per les transaccions d'NFTs