Popular Solana-based crypto wallet Phantom, is back up and running after an hours-long outage that coincided with a GRASS token airdrop.
Phantom’s status page yesterday reported a major incident with the wallet’s backend infrastructure that took two hours and 44 minutes to resolve. The outage resulted in some users seeing inaccurate balances in their accounts.
“Our services should be working well for most users now,” Phantom said in a post on X shortly after the issue had been fixed. “The team will continue to actively monitor the situation,”
Market participants attributed the outage to a surge in user activity related to the GRASS token airdrop, which went live just six minutes before the Phantom disruption began.
Grass is a decentralized platform that allows users to monetize their unused internet bandwidth by contributing it to a network that supports the development of AI models.
Node operators earned activity-based rewards in the form of Grass points, which they could convert and redeem for GRASS tokens on Monday. The first airdrop saw 100 million tokens — 10% of GRASS’s total supply — distributed to users.
To check eligibility and claim tokens, users were encouraged to connect their Solana wallets to the Grass platform and verify their allocations. However, many eligible users faced challenges due to technical issues with the Phantom wallet during the claim process.
Phantom has reported 12 major backend incidents this year — most of which took place on Feb. 1 and accounted for approximately one-and-a-half hours of downtime.
GRASS has seen a volatile first day of trade, and was down 10.2% at press time.
The token, which is available on exchanges including KuCoin, Bybit, and Bitget, had a fully diluted valuation of $813 million at the time of writing.
