The mainnet of the public blockchain Avalanche experienced a block production pause tonight. In response, the founder stated that they are actively investigating the issue and suspect that it may be related to the new smart contract project.
(Prior context:
Smart contracts disrupt Arbitrum! Disconnection for 1.5 hours in the early morning, official statement: sorter crash due to a surge in transactions.
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(Background information:
Smart contracts congest the AVAX network: Binance suspends deposits and withdrawals, Avalanche official wallet disconnects. Is ASC-20 project Dino causing trouble?
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Table of Contents:
Avalanche Co-founder Kevin Sekniqi: Possible cause related to smart contracts
Avalanche previously overwhelmed by smart contracts
Update: Kevin Sekniqi states the crash is unrelated to smart contracts
Established public blockchain Avalanche (Snowslide)
Mainnet
A sudden crash occurred tonight at 19:00, and at the time of writing this article, block production has been paused for over two hours!
Avalanche Co-founder Kevin Sekniqi: Possible cause related to smart contracts
Regarding the crash issue, Avalanche Co-founder Kevin Sekniqi posted on social media platform X at around 20:20, stating:
However, the community seems dissatisfied with Kevin’s response:
But in response to this questioning, Kevin actively replied:
Avalanche previously overwhelmed by smart contracts
In fact, as early as mid-December last year, when the popularity of Bitcoin smart contracts spread to major public blockchains, Avalanche experienced network congestion due to a surge in smart contract transactions. The AVAX official wallet frontend even crashed, displaying the message “Connecting to the new network, please wait.”
At that time, although the Avalanche mainnet was still able to produce blocks normally, the AVAX C-Chain on Binance temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals, indicating that there may have been a large number of users congesting the network. Some users reported that the AVAX wallet on Binance had been under maintenance for over 6 hours without the ability to withdraw.
Update: Kevin Sekniqi states the crash is unrelated to smart contracts
However, in a later tweet, Avalanche Co-founder Kevin Sekniqi denied his previous judgment of “Smart contracts paralyzing Avalanche” and stated that the shutdown is unrelated to smart contracts. The problem lies in the mismanagement of the gossip-related memory pool:
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