Due to a software bug, the primary network (C-chain) of the Avalanche ecosystem went down earlier today, and for a few hours new blocks were not being accepted by the network.
This pause in block processing meant that users of the Avalanche network were not able to send or receive native AVAX coins, tokens, or execute other transactions on the mainnet for several hours.
According to Avalanche's official status report, the network went down due to a glitch in the validator software, which caused the network to produce too much gossip, preventing new blocks from being accepted.
After some quick analysis, the team released version 1.11.1 of the validator client, and a few hours later enough validators had upgraded to the new version, fixing the bug and allowing block production to resume.
The glitch appears to have been triggered by a new wave of inscriptions, which had already been plaguing the network for months, causing transaction fees to go through the roof.
Avalanche Basics
Avalanche is a next-generation smart contract blockchain ecosystem, designed to be a decentralized application (dapp) platform that scales better than Ethereum.
Avalanche is an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible blockchain, meaning that the solidity code written for Ethereum dapps can be migrated relatively easily to the Avalanche ecosystem.
Avalanche achieves scalability by dividing dapps into their own subnets. There are already some dapps that have migrated to their own subnets within the Avalanche ecosystem, including DeFi Kingdoms and StepApp.
Avalanche is experimental technology, and this most recent outage demonstrates that crypto remains in its nascent stage of development.
Innovation Requires Iteration
If you have used Twitter since its early days you probably remember the Twitter "fail whale", which showed up whenever the social network would reach capacity. It took Twitter years of iterations to solve this problem, and support the traffic levels they have today.
Some Twitter/X users were quick to poke fun at Avalanche and other next-generation blockchains that have been experiencing downtime recently, comparing them to Bitcoin, which has been fully operational for nearly a decade now.
Solana has taken the brunt of crypto-twitter jokes over the past couple of years as it experienced several outages throughout 2022. That said, aside from an outage that happened earlier this month, Solana has been gradually stabilizing over the past year.
As blockchain ecosystems grow more and more complex, we should expect these types of bugs to surface, and for iterations to squash them. We can say that there aren't any successful blockchains today that haven't experienced at least one major outage.
Even Bitcoin miners had to cooperate together to reverse transactions when a hacker exploited a vulnerability back in 2010 that produced billions of Bitcoins. Decades from now, we'll look back with nostalgia on how unstable these blockchains were in their early years.
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Until next time...