Polygon’s zkEVM Network: 10-Hour Blackout Raises Concerns

Crypto News- Over the weekend, Polygon’s zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) chain experienced a significant downtime lasting more than 10 hours, as reported by Polygon’s block explorer data.

According to the explorer, there was approximately a 10-hour gap between the sequencing and addition of two consecutive blocks to the chain.

Polygon’s zkEVM Network: 10-Hour Blackout Raises Concerns

Polygon’s team acknowledged the outage in a post on March 23, specifying that it was limited to the rollup chain, which has been in beta since its launch last year. Other chains operating on Polygon’s chain development kit remained unaffected.

The root cause of the problem was identified as an issue with the block sequencer during a layer 1 chain reorganization, where validators disagreed on the most accurate version of the blockchain, resulting in the removal of a weaker duplicate chain.

In an update on March 25, the team revealed that the chain’s emergency council had activated an “emergency state” to enable the core team to address the issue and resume operations on the zkEVM mainnet beta chain.

“After completing this upgrade, the emergency state was deactivated, meaning any further system updates will be subject to a 10-day timelock before implementation,” stated the team.

Despite the setback, Polygon’s zkEVM has been striving to gain traction since its launch on the mainnet beta in March last year. However, data from sources like The Block and L2Beat indicates that it has yet to match the transaction activity and total value locked (TVL) of some rival layer 2 ZK rollup chains. On the other hand, Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chain, the layer 1 blockchain, witnessed a notable increase in transactions by 93% in the latest quarter, with TVL reaching $1.1 billion, as reported by Messari.

Reflecting on the incident, Nick Dodson, CEO of Fuel Network, emphasized the resilience of Polygon’s technology, stating, “Polygon has great tech. We shouldn’t let a sequencer failure sour any reputation. It happens, bugs happen, it’s early tech.