Solana Hackathon Winner Causes Network Disruption

Solana’s disruptive coin Ore wins Hackathon despite network issues.

Even though the project significantly disrupted the blockchain in April, the team behind the proof-of-work powered Solana native cryptocurrency Ore won the “Grand Prize” during a hackathon supported by the Solana Foundation.

For its achievements in the May 6 “Solana Renaissance Hackathon,” which aimed to identify Solana’s “next wave of high-impact projects,” Ore was awarded $50,000 in USD Coin.

However, two of the biggest causes of Solana’s mid-April transaction failure issue—which resulted in more than 70% of non-vote transaction requests being rejected at first—were the abrupt increase in Ore mining transactions and the recent memecoin frenzy.

According to the Solana Foundation, the recent network congestion problems were caused by the increased demand for Solana block space and the delayed implementation of networking stack fixes.

On April 15, Solana engineers intended to apply a patch to address the traffic problem. However, a Dune Analytics dashboard by scarn_eth shows that the non-vote transaction failure rate is roughly 62%.

Just 13 days after its April 16 launch, the Ore team also momentarily suspended its own mining operations to improve the system with a second version. However, Ore’s website indicates that mining appears to have resumed.

Though happy with his success, the anonymous developer, Hardhat Chad, said he and the Ore team “still have a long way to go” before providing Solana users with a “fast, cheap, private, inflation-proof digital currency everyone can mine.”

According to CoinMarketCap, the Ore (ORE) coin has increased 115% to $270.8 since its win was declared yesterday.

Ore’s programming is modeled after Bitcoin’s; however, as Hardhat Chat detailed in a presentation, it was developed as a Solana smart contract that distributes the network’s block rewards among several miners rather than just one. 

With computing now possible on standard PCs, he believes Ore will “make mining fun again” and lower the entry barrier.