On February 23, the Avalanche Layer-1 blockchain encountered issues in its block production process, a crucial mechanism for its operation.
Avalanche's primary network ceased producing blocks across all three of its subnets (C, X and P chains).
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Block production is pivotal for the maintenance and operational continuity of blockchain networks, ensuring transaction validation and recording. Any interruption to this process can significantly delay transactions, affecting the network's overall functionality.
This pause was evident as the blockchain explorer for Avalanche displayed no new blocks for almost two hours, raising alarms and leading to an official notification from Avalanche about the stall in block finalization on their primary network:
Developers across the community are currently investigating a stall in block finalization that is preventing blocks from being accepted on the Primary Network.
Avalanche's co-founder, Kevin Sekniqi, addressed the community via an X post, revealing that the disruption might be linked to the recent introduction of a "new inscription wave," which occurred shortly before the issues began.
Sekniqi suggested the problem could stem from an "esoteric bug from some edge case," likely related to how the network's mempool handles inscriptions.
Further clarification from Sekniqi came nearly an hour later, attributing the halt to a code bug that, while not impacting network performance directly, was triggered by the new inscriptions.
This incident was resolved on the same day.
Despite the temporary setback, the Avalanche team's rapid response and commitment to resolving the issue demonstrate the resilience and adaptability required to maintain trust and functionality within the crypto environment.
This wasn't the first time Avalanche faced such challenges. A similar block production halt was reported on March 23, 2023.