Thread by @metaplex

Today #Solana mainnet-beta went down partially due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. To combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network. tinyurl.com/3bwzd8kb

Candy Machine is used by a majority of new #SolanaNFT projects to launch their collections. In this change, a 0.01 SOL penalty will be collected when a wallet attempts to complete an invalid transaction, which is typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint.

In order to prevent humans from paying penalties, front end minting apps will need to validate whether the target Candy Machine(s) are eligible for minting. We have published an open source reference implementation that you can deploy to solve this.

github.com/metaplex-found…

Botting penalties that are collected will be given to the config account for the Candy Machine instance. The creator of the Candy Machine will then have discretion on how to use the funds collected from these penalties.

In addition, the Metaplex Foundation will continue to invest heavily in evolving the Candy Machine program to discourage botting in support of creators and collectors. We encourage you to share your thoughts below or engage with us on GitHub or Discord.