The Arbitrum network aggregated by Ethereum L2 (Layer 2) encountered some difficulties, causing block production and transaction confirmation to stop completely. According to a report by the Arbitrum team, this event was related to the outage of its sequencer, a special node that manages the order of transactions, rendering the network unusable for about 7 hours.

Arbitration booth 7 hours

The Arbitrum network, an optimistic scaling rollup of the Ethereum network, came to a complete halt on January 9, leaving users unable to transact for about seven hours. The Arbitrum team informed users that these difficulties were caused by issues with their master sequencer node, which experienced a hardware failure that brought the network to a halt.According to arbitration Documentation, a sequencer is a “specially designated full node that is given limited power to control the order of transactions”.

Aggregated Twitter Accounts report First question, clarifying that they are going through a sequencer downtime and stating that all funds are safe.

In post-mortem post, Offchain Labs explain There are other situations that also lead to the situation facing the rollup, noting that:

While we usually have redundancy in place to allow seamless control of the backup sequencer, these also failed to take effect this morning due to an ongoing software upgrade. As a result, the Sequencer stops processing new transactions.

Problems in Rollup Land

This isn’t the first time Arbitrum has faced issues with network operations. The service faced the same problem back in September when Sequencer also went down. This resulted in the network being inoperable for 45 minutes. At the time, Offchain Labs statement:

The root cause of the downtime was a bug that caused the Sequencer to get stuck when it received a large number of transactions in a short period of time. The issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed.

Although Ethereum is focused on scaling with this type of solution, the proposal has not been well received by some users. according to For Delphi Digital, these L2 solutions “are losing market share to L1 in recent months despite migrating DeFi protocols from Ethereum.”

Even so, in terms of Total Value Locked (TVL), Arbitrum is the #1 aggregation solution in the Ethereum ecosystem, with roll out On mainnet last August. The total value locked in the solution exceeds $2.62 billion. data From the Ethereum L2 statistics service L2beat.

What do you think of Arbitrum’s recent downtime? Let us know in the comments section below.

Sergio Goshenko

Sergio is a cryptocurrency journalist based in Venezuela. He describes himself as late to the game, entering the crypto space when prices rose in December 2017. With a background in computer engineering, living in Venezuela, and being affected by the cryptocurrency craze on a social level, he offers a different perspective on the success of cryptocurrencies and how it can help the unbanked and underserved.

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