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 Wednesday morning an exploit of the system’s loophole that affected at least 7,767 digital wallets, the computer programs that store traders’ crypto tokens, according to one of Solana’s Twitter accounts.
The exploit marks a setback for Solana, which is seen as one of the most promising blockchains in the crypto industry. The digital ledger 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.
“Engineers from multiple ecosystems, with help from multiple security firms, are investigating drained wallets on Solana,” the group said on Twitter.
It said wallets that allow traders to keep their coins offline rather than using online applications do not appear to have been affected.
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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.
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.
Engineers from multiple ecosystems, with help from multiple security firms, are investigating drained wallets on Solana. There is no evidence that hardware wallets are affected.
This thread will be updated as new information becomes available.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) 3 August 2022
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 been plagued with processing errors that have weakened 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 so far this year, larger than the declines of larger rivals bitcoin and ether.
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