It took about eight hours for the Ethereum scaling project Polygon’s blockchain network to go down last night because of a technical glitch.
According to a tweet from the company, the network has now been fixed.
It has two layers: Heimdall (the consensus layer, which is based on Cosmos SDK/Tendermint) and Bor (the proof-of-stake layer, which is based on Ethereum) (the block production layer, based on Geth). Small changes on the Bor layer caused the Heimdall layer to get stuck, and the network stopped producing blocks, said Bjelic. This is what happened:
This is what Bjelic said: “The consensus layer should not have been affected in any way” by the upgrade. But because it did, the network went down from 5:50 PM UTC Thursday to 1:50 AM UTC Friday.
To get the blockchain back up and running, Bjelic didn’t say much about the short-term fix, but he said it was put in place “as soon as possible.” A man said, “No one’s money was ever in danger.” There will be a long-term fix, which will require a lot of work from a lot of people and is basically a network upgrade, today or tomorrow.
Over 7,000 decentralized apps have been built or are being built on Polygon’s blockchain network. In December, Polygon was at risk of losing almost all of its MATIC tokens, which were worth $24 billion. This outage comes a few months after that.
It was at the time that Polygon’s proof of stake genesis contract contained a bug that could have let anyone mint all of Polygon’s more than 9.2 billion MATIC tokens from its MRC20 contract. During the hard fork, the project tried to fix the bug, but before it did, a malicious person stole 801,601 MATIC tokens, worth more than $2 million at the time.
He said Polygon is “investing a lot more in security,” but problems keep coming up for the network, which is why he said that at the time.
Disclaimer: These are the writer’s opinions and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research.