Arbitrum Continues to Have Problems Stopping Block Generation

Arbitrum continues to have problems stopping block generation

Updated on the morning of December 16, 2023:

In the early morning of December 16, Arbitrum made an official announcement about the situation, pointing out that the “Inscription” phenomenon – a popular trend on many blockchains such as BNB Chain, Fantom, Avalanche, TON during recently – is the main cause of the sudden increase in transaction volume on Arbitrum and causing network congestion.

Now the problem has been resolved, Arbitrum has created a new block and processes transactions normally.

The Arbitrum One sequencer is up and running after a temporary outage starting at 10:29 AM EST and resuming at 11:57 AM EST.

The team is actively investigating, but we can confirm that a sustained surge of inscriptions triggered the sequencer to stop relaying transactions…

— Arbitrum (💙,🧡) (@arbitrum) December 15, 2023

Data from blockchain shows that 90% of transactions made on Arbitrum before the problem were due to Inscription.

1/ 90% of Arbitrum transactions were inscriptions before the chain stopped

src: https://t.co/TyF7zRSo13 pic.twitter.com/G6DTR0Es2t

— hildobby (@hildobby_) December 15, 2023

Original article on page X:

Accounts on X quickly shared information about Arbitrum’s incident. And of course, major influencers (KOLs) who regularly support Solana (an ecosystem that has been satirized about the chain breaking problem) are the fastest group of people in spreading this information.

arbitrum is down

does anyone know what’s happening? pic.twitter.com/zA92iiDEye

— mert | helius.dev (d/acc) (@0xMert_) December 15, 2023

According to transaction data tracking browser Arbiscan, Arbitrum’s most recent block has sequence number 160384180 and occurred at 3:30 on December 15, 2023 (UTC).

This is not the first time Arbitrum has faced block generation outages. The first time the community mentioned Arbitrum and the issue of stopping block generation was in September 2021.

Additionally, Layer-2 has experienced several other network-related problems. Recently, in August 2023, Arbitrum faced an issue related to ETH balance management in paid wallets, causing the network to be unable to process transactions for about 1 hour. In January 2022, Arbitrum had trouble connecting to the Sequencer network.

However, there has been no official announcement about this phenomenon from the project team. Previously, a similar situation happened with BNB Chain. However, at that time, the transaction volume was too large, making it impossible for browsers to display data in a timely manner, leading to misunderstandings as mentioned.