Ethereum’s Dencun causes ‘Blast’ layer 2 outage

A scaling protocol on Ethereum, Blast, stopped producing blocks for approximately an hour today. This was apparently due to the changes made by Dencun, the widely anticipated hard fork of Ethereum.

Blast users began complaining on X (formerly Twitter) as early as 10:13 AM New York time. Blast fully acknowledged the outage by 10:41 AM, admitting that the layer 2 was not processing any transactions. By 11:19 AM, developers had resolved the issue and block production resumed.

Blast financially incentivized Ethereum users to join their platform with an airdrop and high interest rate offers. To generate these high returns, Blast administrators staked their users’ assets into third-party protocols — initially on Lido’s and Maker’s DAOs.

As of publication time, users have approximately $2.9 billion worth of assets on Blast’s layer 2, which were presumably frozen during the hour-long outage. Embarrassingly, for Blast, the outage occurred during a live Ask Me Anything livestream with Blast leaders on Discord.

Read more: Seneca Protocol hack highlights dangers of Ethereum’s token approval mechanism

Before Blast launched on mainnet, critics noted a pyramid-shaped drawing of Blast’s financial incentives in its early marketing materials. “You get points when your invites get points and their invites get points,” Blast’s website once explained, illustrating payouts in the shape of a pyramid rotated 90 degrees.

Blast leaders claim to have revised these claims and admonished its website designer, contesting that it was ever a pyramid scheme.

The founder of Blast is Tieshun Roquerre (aka Pacman), who is also the creator of NFT marketplace Blur.

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