Despite facing criticism for its role in disrupting the Solana blockchain in April, the team behind the proof-of-work powered Solana-native crypto Ore secured the “Grand Prize” at a hackathon sponsored by the Solana Foundation.
Ore received $50,000 in USD Coin (USDC) for its contributions to the “Solana Renaissance Hackathon,” aimed at identifying Solana’s next high-impact projects.
The sudden surge in Ore mining transactions, coupled with the recent frenzy surrounding memecoins, significantly contributed to Solana’s transaction failure issue in mid-April. Over 70% of non-vote transaction requests were initially rejected, leading to network congestion.
The Solana Foundation attributed the network congestion to the high demand for Solana block space and delays in implementing patches related to its networking stack.
Solana developers aimed to implement fixes to alleviate congestion by April 15. However, the non-vote transaction failure rate remains high, hovering around 62%, according to data from a Dune Analytics dashboard.
The Ore team temporarily suspended its mining operations just 13 days after the project’s launch on April 16 to optimize its system with a second version. Subsequently, mining operations have resumed.
Despite winning the award, Ore’s pseudonymous creator, Hardhat Chad, recognized that there’s still progress to be made before offering Solana users a fast, cheap, private, and inflation-proof digital currency. Ore’s token (ORE) has surged by 115% to $270.8 since the victory was announced.
Ore’s codebase is derived from Bitcoin’s but is adapted as a Solana smart contract to allow multiple miners to share network block rewards, making mining more accessible and enjoyable with ordinary laptops. Hardhat Chad aims to “make mining fun again” and reduce entry barriers to computation.
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