Ethereum Scaling Network decision A “partial outage” was reported on Friday, halting activity on the Arbitrum One blockchain for the first time since June.
Offchain Labs, the company that developed Arbitrum, presentation The network went out at 10:29 a.m. ET on Friday due to a “significant surge in network traffic.” The issue remained unresolved for over an hour and eventually restarted at 11:57 AM ET.
On Friday afternoon, Offchain Labs confirmed that the surge in activity was in fact due to the widely suspected abundance of “inscriptions,” i.e. works of art and media inscribed on the blockchain, similar to NFTs but entirely on-chain.
“Due to continued inscription spikes, we can confirm that the sequencer has properly stopped relaying transactions,” the Arbitrum account said. tweeted. “We have resolved this issue, but gas prices are recovering from volume due to the backlog. It will normalize soon.”
On Twitter, numerous Arbitrum users and Arbitrum-based services reported that they have been unable to process transactions on the network since the outage began.
arbiscanArbitrum’s blockchain explorer initially attributed the network failure to a “surge in activity caused by an inscription.” majority Twitter user. The website’s language was subsequently adjusted to match Arbitrum’s official statement and references to the inscription were removed.
The inscription was first popularized with great success. bitcoin ordinal Earlier this year, there were detailed images and other media pieces with cryptocurrency denominations engraved on them. While prohibitively expensive and a significant improvement in blockchain processing, Inscription had significant implications for the Bitcoin network, which it could never support due to its lack of smart contract functionality. NFT.
But recently, some users have already begun taking on the incredibly energy-intensive project of creating inscriptions on the network that supports NFTs. Last week, inscriptions on the Polygon, BNB Chain, and Avalanche blockchains accounted for a whopping 57% of all traffic across the three major networks, according to an anonymous blockchain analyst. Hill Dobby.
According to Arbitrum One’s data, last week inscription transactions specifically accounted for 30% of all traffic on Arbitrum One. sand analysis.
Before the cause was officially confirmed, numerous Twitter users complained about the possibility of Arbitrum being taken down due to inscription-related traffic. They felt that the innovation was overly costly and did not serve any practical function.
Editor: Andrew Hayward
Editor’s note: This article was updated with additional details after publication after the cause was determined.
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