Ethereum Scaler Arbitrum Suffers Outage—And Scripts Are To Blame It

Ethereum scale network Decision It reported Friday a “partial outage” that halted activity on the Arbitrum One blockchain for the first time since June.

Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum; announced At 10:29am ET on Friday, the network was down due to a “significant increase in network traffic.” The problem remained unresolved for over an hour, finally starting at 11:57 a.m. ET.

On Friday afternoon, Offchain Labs confirmed that the cause of the surge in activity was indeed an overabundance of “writings,” as widely suspected—that is, artworks and media recorded on the blockchain, similar to NFTs but entirely on-chain.

Arbitrum's account tweeted: “We can confirm that the continued influx of scripts has caused the series to stop transmitting transactions properly. “We tested this problem, but because of the reserve, gas prices are recovering from the transaction volume. These should be normalized soon.”

Several users of Arbitrum and Arbitrum-based services on Twitter have reported that they have been completely unable to process transactions on the network since the outage.

ArbiscanBlockchain explorer Arbitrum initially attributed the network's failure to “congestion caused by written texts.” a lot Twitter Users. It has since amended the language on its website to match the arbitrator's official statement by removing references to articles of incorporation.

Articles, first popularized with great success Bitcoin ordinary Earlier this year, they were detailed images or other media elements in cryptocurrency denominations. Despite being incredibly expensive and a huge drag on blockchains, scripts have created a sense of fairness for the Bitcoin network, which has never been able to support it due to a lack of smart contract capabilities. NFTs.

But recently, some users have started the incredibly energy-intensive project of creating scripts on networks that support NFTs. Last week's posts on the Polygon, BNB chain and Avalanche blockchains accounted for 57 percent of the traffic on the three major networks, according to a pseudonymous blockchain analyst. Hildoby.

Data shows that last week, text transactions accounted for 30% of all traffic on Arbitrum One. Dune analysis.

Before it officially confirmed the cause, several Twitter users expressed their frustration that the innovation was costly and ineffective, resulting in a drop in arbitrage-related traffic.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.

Editor's note: This story was updated with additional details after publication after the cause was confirmed.