Significant Disruption in Block Production Impacts Avalanche Protocol: AVAX Price Affected

By: Eva Baxter

A significant disruption in block production impacted the Avalanche (AVAX) C-Chain, which led to a halt lasting over an hour. The block production interruption is believed to be related to the launch of a new inscription wave and is being investigated by the team behind the Avalanche protocol, Ava Labs. Despite thorough testing conducted on testnets, unexpected challenges were introduced in the mainnet environment. The consequences of this incident on the AVAX price are yet to be determined.

This disruption, which significantly affected the primary network and caused slight delays in other subnets, was observed through the Avascan browser. The last transaction recorded was at block 42046853 (19:13 UTC+8). Kevin Sekniqi, co-founder of Avalanche, pointed to an "esoteric bug" from an untested edge case as the probable cause for this interruption. He stressed on the need for a rapid resolution to this issue.

A mempool handling issue related to inscriptions encountering untested edge cases is being linked to this disruption. Kevin Sekniqi acknowledged that while in an ideal scenario, there should be no untested edge cases, continuous updates and the complexity of the codebase make it difficult to anticipate every possible situation.

During this block production halt, the price of AVAX, the native token of the Avalanche protocol, has dipped further adding to the ongoing decline since Thursday when it was priced at $43. The AVAX price has dropped to $36.13, indicating a decline of over 2% within the past 24 hours and a substantial drop of 11.7% over the course of the previous seven days.