Ethereum L2 Starknet suffers 2nd mainnet outage in 2 months

Ethereum scaling solution Starknet suffered another mainnet outage, causing investor concerns over the reliability of the blockchain network.

The Starknet layer-2 (L2) blockchain suffered an outage on Tuesday, affecting the mainnet for two hours and 44 minutes, leading to slow block creation and stagnating transactions on the network.

The outage was caused by the network’s sequencer, which, in blockchain terms, operates like a traffic controller for onchain transactions, ordering transactions set to be included in a given block.

During Tuesday’s outage, the Starknet sequencer was unable to recognize the “Cairo0 code,” according to data from status.starknet.io

Source: status.starknet.ioThis marked the second “major outage” on the mainnet within two months, creating potential concerns about the reliability of Starknet as Ethereum's seventh-largest L2 network, with $548 million in total value locked (TVL), according to data from L2beat.com.

During the previous outage on July 18, the Starknet mainnet was only affected for 13 minutes by slow block creation times and a slow gateway.

Top Ethereum L2s by TVL. Source: L2beat.comRelated: Crypto is one ‘growth cycle’ away from mainstream adoption, 5B users

L2 networks are secondary blockchains built on top of the Ethereum mainnet to improve transaction speed and capacity by processing transactions offchain.

Starknet uses ZK-rollups (specifically STARK proofs) to provide high-throughput and low-cost transactions to scale the Ethereum mainnet.

Related: $11B Bitcoin whale surpasses SharpLink with $4B Ethereum bet

Starknet is back online, “fully operational”

Less than three hours into the outage, Starknet was able to restore full functionality, wrote Starknet’s community-member-run X account in a Tuesday post, adding:

“Block production is back to normal. Most RPC providers are up-and-running, and the remaining ones will upgrade shortly.”

“To restore service, transactions submitted between 2:23 am and 4:36 am UTC were not processed,” the announcement said, adding that a blockchain reorganization from block 1960612 was “committed, representing one hour of activity.”

This means that all transactions from that block forward will need to be resubmitted by users. The announcement added that a “full timeline,” including the root cause and long-term prevention measures, will be published by the team.

Cointelegraph has approached Starknet to find out more details about the network outage.

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