the crypto blockchain interrupted for over 5 hours

The Avalanche crypto blockchain suffered an outage on Friday, failing to produce blocks for over 5 hours.

Avalanche: the outage of the crypto blockchain for over 5 hours on Friday 23 February

Apparently, Friday February 23, 2024, the Avalanche crypto blockchain suffered an outage of over 5 hours, failing to produce blocks.

The finalization of the blocks then resumed thanks todeveloper interventionwho would release a software update that fixed faulty logic in the code.

And in fact, here’s what the notice to Avalanche validators says:

“Please update your AvalancheGo node to version v1.11.1: https://github.com/ava-labs/avalanchego/releases/tag/v1.11.1 This version disables the logic added in v1.10.18 that brought the validators to send an excessive amount of gossip to each other.

Avalanche validators provide a weighted bandwidth allocation for each peer, and this faulty logic led to each node saturating its allocation with unnecessary transaction gossip.

This dynamic prevented pull requests issued by the validator from being processed in a timely manner and led to a consensus deadlock (since polls were not being handled). As soon as enough stakes update to this release, consensus should return to normal. February 23, 15:59 UTC”

In practice, validators are entities spread across the world that manage blockchain nodes, securing the network and processing transactions.

The software patch fixed an issue where More information than necessary passed between nodes, which strained the network and eventually took it offline.

Avalanche: the crypto blockchain is back active and the hypotheses of the co-founder of Ava Labs

In the five hours of investigation, the co-founder of Ava Labs expressed his opinion on the case of the Avalanche crypto blockchain, Kevin Sekniqi:

“The Avalanche primary network block manufacturing issue is being investigated. It appears to be tied to a new wave of signups that launched about an hour ago. Obviously this is an esoteric bug due to an edge case that should be handled quickly. This is probably a mempool management issue with subscriptions that affected some untested edge cases.”

Basically, for Sekniqi, the cause of the problem was “the wave of signups” that had occurred an hour before the outage on the Avalanche network. Subscriptions are a way to record arbitrary data on a blockchain without smart contracts.

The price of AVAX

Anyway, looking at the price graph of the crypto Avalanche (AVAX)during Friday and Saturday, it seems there was a dump. From Saturday to today, however, this price dump seems to have already been recovered.

And in fact, AVAX is now worth $36.63 still in dump of 8% compared to seven days ago. On Saturday, AVAX had hit its weekly low of $35.24.

Looking at the whole of February, however, the ninth crypto by market cap, AVAX had recorded a bull market. The price at the beginning of the month was $32.4 against $43.27 in the middle of the month.

Going to January 2024, however, Avalanche made headlines after he announced a $100 million fund dedicated to memecoins. This is the “Culture Catalyst” fund, originally conceived to support NFT artists and now open to memecoin projects on Avalanche.