Solana wallets ’emptied’ in strike against crypto network
Thousands of crypto accounts linked to the Solana blockchain have been “emptied” in a blow to one of the largest networks in the digital asset market.
Solana and several other platforms linked to the blockchain were investigating an apparent hack on Wednesday that affected at least 7,767 digital wallets, the computer programs that store traders’ crypto tokens.
The Solana Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on the growth and security of the Solana network, told the Financial Times that it “does not appear”[ads1]; that the exploit had affected the core infrastructure, but rather was caused by a bug “in software used. of several wallets that are popular among Solana users”.
The apparent hack marks another setback for Solana, which has been touted as one of the potential long-term winners of the crypto industry because it was built to handle thousands of trades per second, but has faced a series of outages in recent months.
The Solana Foundation said on Wednesday that “engineers from multiple ecosystems, with the help of multiple security firms, are investigating drained wallets on Solana”. In many recent episodes of crypto-hacking, users did not receive their money back since transactions cannot usually be reversed on blockchains.
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Phantom, a wallet app built on Solana, and Solana’s non-fungible token marketplace Magic Eden were among the vendors that said they were affected in the apparent hacking incident.
The Solana Foundation said wallets that allow traders to keep their coins offline rather than using online applications do not appear to have been affected.
Solana Labs, a developer of the Solana blockchain, is backed by major groups in traditional and cryptocurrency markets, including venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, high-speed trading boutique Jump Trading and Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research.
Solana is designed to process up to 50,000 trades per second, a scale far beyond rivals including bitcoin and ethereum, and on par with established traditional financial services such as the Nasdaq stock exchange. In January, Bank of America analysts said Solana “could become the Visa of the digital asset ecosystem.”
However, Solana has suffered from processing errors that have tarnished its reputation. The entire Solana network went dark for four hours in June, an outage that was documented on the network’s official status website.
Blockchain’s eponymous native coin has fallen nearly 80 percent this year, bigger than the drops experienced by bigger rivals bitcoin and ether.
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