In Brief:
- The Arbitrum network suffered its second outage in less than five months.
- “The core issue was a hardware failure in our main Sequencer node,” it explained.
- The team is working on a “twofold method of lowering Sequencer downtime”.
The core network of the Arbitrum ethereum L2 scaling solution crashed. A bug in the Sequencer smart contract forced the protocol to stop issuing fresh blocks, according to the project team. The developers have ensured that the user’s cash is safe.
At the moment, the Offchain Labs platform indicated that the sequencer was having troubles, preventing transactions from being executed for the time being. “We are currently experiencing Sequencer downtime,” the post read.
The Sequencer smart contract has only a limited amount of control over transaction orders. User transactions are immediately recorded as a result of this, prior to getting authenticated by the Ethereum blockchain. The use of this contract to transfer payments is optional, clients can choose to opt out.
Arbitrum provided an inspection on Jan. 10 clarifying what had caused the brief outage. “The core issue was a hardware failure in our main Sequencer node,” it explained, adding that backup Sequencer redundancy that would typically assume control also failed owing to a software update that was still in progress.
In a broader perspective, this was a tiny downtime, but the team did remind customers that the network is still in testing. Arbitrum is the most popular layer-two network at the moment with a total value locked of $2.57 billion giving it a L2 market share of 47%.
Following the event, the developers asserted that this contract is incapable of stealing funds or forging transactions because every activity executed is digitally signed by a user, which is then verified in L2. They also warned of possible re-failures, since Arbitrum One is still in beta testing.
“The Arbitrum network is still in beta, and we will keep this moniker as long as there are points of centralization that still exist in the system.”
The team concluded that it was working on decentralising the network even further with a “twofold method of lowering Sequencer downtime” that will be implemented in the approaching weeks and months.
Such outages aren’t uncommon in the cryptosphere; in reality, Solana Blockchain recently saw its third DDoS attack. Solana suffered a ‘major technical breakdown’ three times in the six months.
