The popular Solana-based Phantom Wallet encountered significant service disruptions on October 28, 2024, as millions of users rushed to claim and trade the newly launched GRASS token in what’s being called the largest airdrop in Solana’s history. The wallet’s development team acknowledged an “uptime incident” affecting various services, prompting them to advise users to proceed with transactions through decentralized applications despite simulation errors.
The disruption coincided with the highly anticipated launch of GRASS, a Solana-based artificial intelligence data layer project that garnered immediate attention from major cryptocurrency exchanges. According to SolanaFloor, approximately 2 million users attempted to interact with their GRASS tokens within hours of the airdrop, creating unprecedented demand on Phantom Wallet’s backend infrastructure. Despite the wallet’s service issues, several prominent exchanges, including Bybit, Bitget, KuCoin, and Crypto.com, successfully listed the token for trading.
Notably, while Phantom Wallet struggled with the massive influx of transactions, the Solana blockchain itself maintained 100% uptime throughout the event, marking a significant improvement from its historical performance issues. This stability showcase comes as a stark contrast to similar high-volume events in the past, such as the August DOGS token launch that disrupted both the Telegram Wallet and multiple cryptocurrency exchanges. The incident highlights both the growing pains of scaling Web3 infrastructure and Solana’s enhanced network resilience in handling major token events.
