Starknet Faces Transaction Backlog after Outage; Solana Hit by Multiple Glitches
Summary:
Starknet, an Ethereum Layer-2 protocol, experienced a four-hour block production outage due to a reorganization of blocks caused by a rounding error bug. Although block production continued, the outage caused a backlog of transactions. This setback is one of many recent system glitches plaguing large blockchain platforms such as Solana, which in February 2024, encountered a significant block progression interruption lasting over five hours. Solana's outage, caused by a bug in the JIT compilation cache, happened despite plans to upgrade systems. In April, nearly 75% of all Solana network transactions failed due to the surge in memecoin trading activity.
A reorganization of blocks in the Ethereum layer-2 protocol, Starknet, caused transaction backlogs due to an unforeseen outage in the block production for four hours. This was evident on Starkscan, a block monitoring tool, which displayed a disconnect between the formation of blocks 630028 and 630029 on April 4. Starknet's status page, however, did not show any network outages on the same day. Starknet later issued a statement claiming a rounding error bug had caused the reorganization. Despite this, block production continued as normal. However, the reorganization led to transaction backlog quickly reaching its full capacity. During these circumstances, there were brief moments where new transactions weren't processed and subsequently rejected. Some transactions were even reversed due to fluctuating parameters such as timestamps, according to Starknet's explanations. Despite contacting Starknet for more precise details, Cointelegraph is yet to receive any further information. The last major outage indicated on Starknet's status page dates back to March 13, during Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade which slowed down the block creation process. The recent interruption is just one of a string of system glitches experienced by large blockchain platforms. Solana, for example, experienced a substantial outage in February 2024, during which the network’s block progression was held up for over five hours. This has been a recurring issue for Solana, with around six significant outages noted since January 2022, along with 15 days of partial or major interruptions. Following Solana's recent outage on February 9, software development company Anza reported that a bug was found in Solana's Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache that pre-compiles all programs before executing a transaction. Later, Austin Federa from the Solana Foundation hinted at plans to upgrade from an old loader system to a new one, a process which was already in the pipeline. Federa said, “someone purposely used the old instruction set, still present in the codebase but hadn’t been used for a while. This led to the JIT compiler running into problems identifying what it needs, creating an infinite loop.” In April, Solana experienced another hiccup when approximately 75% of all transactions on the network failed due to increased activity from the recent memecoin trend. These failed transactions were primarily attributed to bot activities on Solana conducting arbitrage trades.
Published At
4/5/2024 3:20:46 PM
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