According to Blockworks, the Solana network is set to experience some relief from its recent congestion issues as the Ore project suspends all mining activities. The decision was announced by the project's pseudonymous creator, Hardhat Chad, following a series of network instability and congestion problems. The announcement led to a significant increase in Ore's price, which more than tripled from around $93 to over $300, before settling at around $215.
Ore is a blockchain-based project that was launched on the Solana network with the aim of exploring a more engaging and equitable way of distributing cryptocurrency. It implemented a proof-of-work (PoW) token distribution mechanism, similar to that used by Bitcoin. However, the Solana blockchain operates differently, using a proof-of-history (PoH) consensus combined with proof-of-stake (PoS), which significantly speeds up transactions and reduces costs.
Despite its initial success, Ore quickly became the most active program on Solana by transaction count, leading to a surge in failed transactions. As many as 75% of non-vote Solana transactions were not going through in early April, a figure that has since reduced to around 60%. This issue, coupled with the realization that Solana's low fees can work against the network when the transaction cost isn't high enough to discourage spam, led to the decision to pause Ore mining activities.
The pause is temporary, allowing Hardhat Chad and his team to redesign the Ore contract for a Version 2 (v2). The next iteration aims to optimize the existing system, address inefficiencies that gave some miners an asymmetric advantage, and introduce structural incentives for holding the token. All existing Ore tokens will be upgradable one-for-one into the new v2 token, ensuring fairness and continuity for current participants. As Solana continues to deploy patches to improve performance and manage congestion, Ore’s v2 is being developed to better align with these network upgrades.