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The Avalanche blockchain has encountered a disruption due to a “stall in block finalization.” AVA Labs’ co-founder, Kevin Sekniqi, suggested that the problem might stem from a recent surge in inscriptions.
Avalanche Hits Snag as Block Finalization Stall Disrupts Service
Avalanche (AVAX) is grappling with a service interruption, echoing challenges previously seen on the Solana blockchain. The Avalanche Status page indicates a disruption in block production. The page provides an update, stating, “Developers across the community are currently investigating a stall in block finalization that is preventing blocks from being accepted on the primary network.”
Kevin Sekniqi, co-founder of AVA Labs, took to the social media platform X to address the situation. “Investigating Avalanche primary network block production issue right now,” Sekniqi said. “Seems to be related to a new inscription wave launched about an hour ago.”
Sekniqi further elaborated:
Obviously, this is some esoteric bug from some edge case which should be handled quickly. Likely some mempool handling issue with inscriptions that hit some untested edge cases.
One individual responded to Sekniqi saying, “Fix this sh** quick bro smells like SOL in here.” The AVA Labs’ co-founder followed up with a response to his original statement. “Clarification on this: the issue seems to be a gossip-related mempool management bug, which is purely a code-related bug, and not an issue with performance handling,” Sekniqi remarked. “Inscriptions seem to have hit the edge case, but inscriptions did not affect performance.”
Following these developments, the native token of the layer one (L1) blockchain, AVAX, has seen a 1.28% decline in its value, with a more significant drop of over 12% this week. This downturn comes in the wake of an outage experienced by Solana in the first week of February 2024, adding to the difficulties it faced before this recent interruption.
Validators Urged to Update Nodes
Following Sekniqi’s X posts, the Avalanche Status page issued a follow-up announcement, urging validators to “please upgrade your node to Avalanchego v1.11.1.” This update deactivates a feature introduced in v1.10.18, which resulted in validators excessively exchanging gossip. According to the update, Avalanche Validators allocate bandwidth to peers based on stake weight, and this flawed feature caused nodes to overwhelm their bandwidth with unnecessary transaction gossip, as detailed in the status page’s explanation.
“This dynamic prevented pull queries issued by the validator from being processed in a timely manner and led to consensus stalling (as no polls were being handled),” the status page notes. “As soon as a sufficient amount of stake upgrades to this release, consensus should return to normal.”
What do you think about the Avalanche chain having difficulties on Friday? Share your thoughts and opinions about this subject in the comments section below.