Bitcoin-like mining protocol Ore halts mining on Solana amid network congestion

After exacerbating congestion of the Solana SOL -4.77% network, Ore, the project with a token mined akin to bitcoin, announced it is pausing mining.

"I have decided to pause all mining, effective immediately," posted @HardhatChad to X, who appears to be the pseudonymous designer of the Ore project. "I believe this action to be in the best interests of Solana, Ore holders, and the fastest path forward to v2."

After the project launched about two weeks ago, it captured the attention of the Solana community, which began ore mining in earnest. Due to the quick rise in interest and mining, more transactions flooded the Solana network, seemingly contributing to congestion issues.

Meanwhile, Solana was also grappling with another source of congestion: increased transactions initiated by both bots and newly released memecoins. Block space demand skyrocketed, and the network slowed. In response, Solana released a patch update to alleviate congestion.

"Ore launched just two weeks ago as an experimental hackathon project," @HardhatChad also said on X. "Since then, it 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 crypto. According to the number of puzzles they solve, miners earn a share of 1 ORE per minute. 

"The recent difficulty updates have shown conclusively that a new contract design is needed," @HardhatChad also said on X. "By pausing now, I will gain much needed time to study the data, organize a team, and focus our energies on getting v2 right."

@HardhatChad said on X spaces on Tuesday that v2 will hopefully be ready in a "handful of weeks."