Key Points
- Ore, a Bitcoin-like mining protocol, has suspended mining due to congestion on the Solana network.
- The halt aims to allow time for data analysis, team organization, and the development of a new contract design.
The mining protocol Ore, which operates similarly to Bitcoin, has halted all mining activities on the Solana network due to increased congestion.
This decision was announced by the pseudonymous designer of the Ore project, known as @HardhatChad.
Mining Suspension Amid Network Congestion
The Ore project, which began about two weeks ago, quickly attracted the attention of the Solana community. The sudden surge in interest and mining activities led to an influx of transactions on the Solana network, contributing to the congestion issues.
Simultaneously, Solana was dealing with another congestion source – increased transactions initiated by bots and newly released memecoins. This resulted in a rapid increase in block space demand and a slowdown of the network.
In response to these issues, Solana implemented a patch update to alleviate the congestion.
Ore’s Impact and Future Plans
Since its launch, Ore has grown to become the most used program on Solana by transaction count, and generated a greater peak load of mainnet network traffic than any smart contract in blockchain history.
With Ore, miners solve cryptographic puzzles to secure the network and earn cryptocurrency. Miners earn a share of 1 ORE per minute based on the number of puzzles they solve.
However, the recent difficulty updates have highlighted the need for a new contract design. The pause in mining will allow @HardhatChad and his team to analyze the data, organize a team, and focus on developing a new contract design.
According to @HardhatChad, the new version (v2) of the contract design is expected to be ready in a few weeks.