Avalanche (AVAX) Price Dips As Network Suffer Major Outage

Layer-1 blockchain Avalanche is experiencing a major network outage. The issue resolves around a stall in blockchain finalization, making the addition of new blocks on the “Primary Network” impossible. According to the network’s status page, the outage had lasted for over an hour at press time. The fault has caused a negative trend for Avalanche’s native cryptocurrency, AVAX.

Avalanche Sees Major Outage

According to data from Avalanche’s status page, developers continue to investigate the issue. Although the Avalanche network has seen mild network issues in the past, this will be the first time the blockchain will be experiencing a major outage.

On February 1st, the blockchain saw block ingestion “due to an issue with an infrastructure provider,” affecting the Primary Network and subnets. The issue was resolved within five hours. In March 2023, Avalanche’s X-Chain and C-Chain experienced a network outage due to a bug in a software update. These smaller blockchains are responsible for crypto trading and DeFi activities, respectively. The issue was subsequently resolved.

Kevin Sekniqi, co-founder of Ava Labs, revealed in a tweet that the fault may be tied to a “new inscription wave” which was integrated with the network earlier today. Inscriptions involve the use of arbitrary data to inscribe images, texts, audio, video, or other forms of media on the blockchain, giving them a similar resemblance to non-fungible tokens.

Obviously this is some esoteric bug from some edge case which should be handled quickly.

Likely some mempool handling issue with inscriptions that hit some untested edge cases.

— Kevin Sekniqi ???? (@kevinsekniqi) February 23, 2024

The Ava Labs boss added that the fault had occurred despite the precautionary measure of deploying the program on the testnet before entering the mainnet.

AVAX Drops

Following news of the major outage, AVAX dropped to a trading price of $36.3, representing a 2.3% decrease in the past 24 hours and an 11% drop over the past week.