According to Cointelegraph, Ethereum's layer-2 scaling solution Starknet experienced a significant mainnet outage, sparking investor concerns over the network's reliability. The disruption occurred on Tuesday, lasting for two hours and 44 minutes, and resulted in slow block creation and halted transactions across the network. The outage was attributed to issues with the network's sequencer, which functions as a traffic controller for on-chain transactions, organizing them for inclusion in blocks.
During the outage, the Starknet sequencer failed to recognize the "Cairo0 code," as reported by status.starknet.io. This incident marks the second major outage within two months, raising questions about Starknet's dependability as Ethereum's seventh-largest layer-2 network, which boasts $548 million in total value locked (TVL), according to L2beat.com. The previous outage on July 18 affected the mainnet for only 13 minutes, causing slow block creation times and a sluggish gateway.
Layer-2 networks, like Starknet, are secondary blockchains built atop the Ethereum mainnet to enhance transaction speed and capacity by processing transactions off-chain. Starknet employs ZK-rollups, specifically STARK proofs, to deliver high-throughput and low-cost transactions, thereby scaling the Ethereum mainnet. Despite the recent setback, Starknet was able to restore full functionality within three hours, as confirmed by a community-member-run X account. The account stated, "Block production is back to normal. Most RPC providers are up-and-running, and the remaining ones will upgrade shortly."
To resume service, transactions submitted between 2:23 am and 4:36 am UTC were not processed, and a blockchain reorganization from block 1960612 was committed, representing one hour of activity. Consequently, users will need to resubmit all transactions from that block forward. The announcement also mentioned that a comprehensive timeline, including the root cause and long-term prevention measures, will be released by the team. Cointelegraph has reached out to Starknet for further details regarding the network outage.
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Hui Xin