1/ This past Saturday night after SmartCon, someone attempted to spam a select few Chainlink nodes, aiming to disrupt the network through unnecessary on-chain computations

This spam attempt was unsuccessful and all Chainlink oracle networks continued to update with fresh data

2/ During the short lived spam wave, nodes stayed live and were topped up with $ETH as needed, thanks to the active monitoring systems used in-production

This acted as a stress test that proved the extreme reliability of the Chainlink network, even during adversarial conditions

3/ The cryptoeconomic security backing the Chainlink network ensured node operators spent resources to stay live as the incentive to maintain reliable oracle services in the long run is greater than going offline and taking a reputation hit

All $LINK nodes are still live

4/ Ethereum experienced a similar wave of spam in 2016 that also failed to take the network down

Even though it occurred in the middle of the night just after SmartCon, the Chainlink network autonomously kept operating as designed

No users of chainlink were adversely affected

5/ A patch was implemented and swiftly deployed by Chainlink node operators, filtering out all such spam attempts

With the upcoming threshold signatures upgrade, nodes will very rarely need to pay for on-chain transactions at all

TL;DR What doesn't kill you make you stronger