Key points to remember
- Arbitrum’s Arbitrum One chain is down. The last block on the network was processed at 10:29:22 UTC.
- Arbitrum has confirmed that it is “experiencing sequencer downtime.”
- Arbitrum is one of many Layer 2 solutions aimed at helping Ethereum overcome its scalability challenges.
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Arbitrum suffered from similar problems in September– but they did not take several hours to resolve.
Arbitrum One goes down
Arbitrum One, Ethereum’s leading Layer 2 scaling solution, is down.
The team behind the project posted a tweet on Sunday afternoon confirming that the network was suffering from issues. “We are currently experiencing sequencer downtime,” the post read. “Thank you for your patience as we work to restore it. All system funds are safe and we will post updates here. ”
We are currently experiencing sequencer downtime. Thank you for your patience as we work to restore it. All system funds are safe and we will post updates here.
– Arbitrator (@arbitrum) January 9, 2022
Data Arbiscan and Off-line laboratories suggests that the last block in the project’s Arbitrum One chain was 4509808, which was processed at 10:29:22 UTC. That means it’s been down for over four hours at press time.
Arbitrum has experienced similar issues in the past, although today’s incident appears to be more serious. In September, the Arbitrum One chain suffered another outage, but the issue was resolved within an hour.
Arbitrum is Ethereum’s most widely used Layer 2 solution today, with a total locked-in value of over $ 2.5 billion. Since launching on the mainnet in August 2021, it has attracted several of Ethereum’s top DeFi protocols such as Balancer and Uniswap, with more to follow in the future.
Arbitrum relies on optimistic rollups, which process transactions at significantly higher speeds and lower costs than the backbone by sending the transactions as call data to the Ethereum mainnet. Optimistic rollups do not handle the calculation by default, but they suffer from a weakness in that it can take up to a week to send funds to the mainnet as withdrawals are subject to a challenge period.
Optimistic Rollups is considered one of Ethereum’s two primary Layer 2 scaling weapons alongside ZK-Rollups, which use Zero-Knowledge evidence rather than the fraud evidence used in Optimistic Rollups. Ethereum believers are hopeful that the emergence of new Optimistic Rollup and ZK-Rollup will help the network evolve in 2022, as the completion of Ethereum 2.0, when 64 new shard chains will be added, is still a long way off.
Although Ethereum has seen increased use over the past year thanks to the growing interest in NFTs, DeFi, and crypto assets in general, it has been plagued by high gas fees throughout. year as the price of ETH skyrocketed. As a result, new Layer 1 networks like Solana and Avalanche took center stage in the second half of 2021.
2022 is expected to be a major year for Layer 2 adoption. However, as today’s outage proves, the Layer 2 ecosystem is still in its infancy.-Presenting an opportunity for Ethereum’s competitors to catch up and take a share of the network’s market share.
Update 17:44 UTC: Arbitrum One is still down and no other blocks are being processed.
This story is developing and will be updated as more details emerge.
Arbitrum did not immediately respond to Crypto Briefing’s request for comment.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies. They were also exposed to BAL and UNI in a cryptocurrency index.
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