Ethereum’s scaling game took another hit.
Starknet, one of the leading Layer-2 networks built to speed up and cheapen Ethereum transactions, went offline for nearly three hours on Tuesday – its second major outage in just two months.
The disruption followed the much-anticipated Grinta upgrade, raising questions about whether high-performance blockchain networks can deliver on reliability as they race to decentralize.
Starknet, Ethereum’s seventh-largest Layer-2 blockchain with $548 million locked in its ecosystem, suffered a two-hour, 44-minute outage early Tuesday.
The disruption followed the rollout of Grinta (v0.14.0), a major network upgrade meant to overhaul Starknet’s architecture. The network’s sequencer, which manages the order of transactions, failed to process activity, halting block production and leaving users unable to complete transactions.
A blockchain reorganization was triggered from block 1,960,612, meaning an hour’s worth of activity had to be rolled back. Users were asked to resubmit all transactions made during that window.
This is the second time in two months that Starknet has faced downtime. Back in July, the network stalled for about 13 minutes due to slow block creation.
The repeat incidents raise questions about whether Ethereum’s Layer-2 networks, often promoted as a solution for scaling, can deliver both speed and stability.
The Starknet team recently confirmed that the network was “fully operational” again.
“Block production is back to normal. Most RPC providers are up-and-running, and the remaining ones will upgrade shortly,” the team said in a post on X, adding that a full timeline and technical explanation will be shared soon.
The Grinta upgrade was designed to make Starknet more decentralized, with changes to its sequencer, fee system, and mempool. Starknet has also announced plans to integrate Bitcoin staking following overwhelming community approval of proposal SNIP-31.
But as today’s incident shows, major network upgrades come with risk.
The outage, which lasted for nearly three hours, was triggered by a sequencer failure following the Grinta (v0.14.0) upgrade. The sequencer, which orders transactions, became unable to process activity.
A sequencer is a component in a Layer-2 blockchain that gathers and orders transactions into batches before submitting them to the main Layer-1 blockchain (like Ethereum).
A blockchain reorganization is when a chain’s history is rewritten to remove a temporary, incorrect branch. The network re-established the correct transaction history by rolling back about an hour’s worth of activity.
No. This is the second major outage in two months. In July, the network also stalled for about 13 minutes due to slow block creation, raising concerns about its stability.
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