On Monday, the experimental currency Ore won $50,000 during a Solana Foundation-backed hackathon aimed at identifying Solana’s “next wave of high-impact projects.”
“High impact” presumably refers to Ore’s potential to make a positive change in Solana’s adoption rates. But so far, Ore’s impact has been more of a blow: The project halted mining in mid-April after the avalanche of network usage from mining the currency made it difficult for Solana users to have their transactions recorded in blocks.
Ore is an experiment using the proof-of-work security mechanism on the Solana blockchain. PoW systems essentially pay miners rewards in their own currency in exchange for computing power that makes blockchains difficult to attack. Bitcoin is secured in this way, unlike Solana, which combines a system called proof-of-history with proof-of-stake, Ethereum’s chosen consensus mechanism.
Read more: Solana’s price continues to fall as Ore suspends mining on the network
Ore rewrote a more egalitarian version of the Bitcoin protocol as a Solana smart contract, the project’s pseudonymous creator Hardhat Chad explained in a demo video. Unlike Bitcoin, which gives 3,125 bitcoin to the fastest miner who returns a certain cryptographic hash every ten minutes, Ore is set up where multiple miners can win a piece of the network’s block rewards. An average of one ORE is created per minute, distributed among successful miners.
For many in Solana’s speculation-loving ecosystem, the idea of “Bitcoin on Solana” was simply too juicy to pass up, and ore mining transactions drove up activity and quickly clogged the network. One miner reported “blindly sending millions” of transactions per second, hoping some would land.
Amid the surge in usage, Solana users saw more and more of their transactions dropped rather than recorded in blocks, and Solana developers rushed to patch the congested network. Perhaps mercifully, Ore temporarily stopped mining on April 16. Shortly afterwards, Solana released a network upgrade to help alleviate the congestion.
In an Solana could thank Ore for the stress test, but the project would redeploy a better constructed v2, the developer said.
Ore largely disappeared from view before winning the “Solana Renaissance” hackathon, which was judged by key figures in the Solana ecosystem, including the chain’s co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal. Colosseum, which organizes Solana hackathons including this one and makes venture investments in some of the winners, says the competition attracted more than 1,000 entries. The Solana Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports the Solana ecosystem, is a limited partner in Colosseum’s venture capital fund.
Solana’s thought leadership seems to believe that a second version of Ore could be less chaotic than the first go-around.
“The network should handle something like this,” Jon Wong, head of ecosystem engineering at the Solana Foundation, told Blockworks. “It’s not specifically about Ore, it’s about continuously testing the network to get better.”
Hardhat Chad is also optimistic.
“Ore exists for one reason: to provide the world with a fast, cheap, private, inflation-proof digital currency that anyone can mine,” Hardhat Chad wrote on X in honor of the hackathon win.
Ore v2 is “[f]eature complete” and is currently running simulations in anticipation of audits, Hardhat Chad said Monday.
Those who got their hands on the ore mined before the shutdown are getting richer in the meantime. The token’s price rose more than 90% on Monday after the announcement, according to CoinGecko, trading around $228 at the time of writing.