Solana’s 7th outage this year highlights network inefficiencies 😬; Crypto.com slashing card rewards shows the fragility of native tokens & importance of incentives 📉; Crypto-backed home loans? 🏠

Good Morning FinTech, 3 May

Good day Everyone,

And happy Tuesday! I hope Monday wasn’t too tough for you. If you’re still trying to catch up though, these 3 FinTech stories should definitely bring some energy home. Today’s issue is focused on blockchain networks, crypto cards, and crypto-backed loans. So let’s jump straight into the good stuff:

Solana’s 7th outage this year highlights network inefficiencies 😬

The news 🗞 The Solana network has suffered its seventh outage this year as bots took down the network over the weekend. Solana went down due to a large number of transactions from the nonfungible token (NFT) minting bots.

More on this 👉 A record-breaking 4 million transactions, or 100 gigabits of data per second, congested the network causing validators to be knocked out of consensus resulting in Solana going dark. The bots hoarded a popular application used by Solana NFT projects to launch collections called Candy Machine.

The outage caused the price of SOL, the blockchain’s native coin, to crash by nearly 7% to $84, although trading since has seen prices recover and SOL is changing hands at around $88/coin at the time of writing.

This not only highlights the network’s inefficiencies but also makes one question the future of the “Ethereum killer”. Here’s the takeaway: