Canto blockchain, a layer-1 general-purpose blockchain network, has been facing challenges in restarting block production since August 11th. The network came to a halt at block 10847516, as reported by Canto Explorer. In an announcement on August 12th, the project disclosed that they were encountering an issue with consensus, which was causing the chain to stop producing blocks. They assured users that all funds were safe and that an upgrade to address the issue would be implemented.
A consensus mechanism is crucial in blockchain networks as it validates the authenticity of transactions, ensuring a consistent and accurate record of the blockchain’s data. While Canto did not disclose the exact cause of the outage, they reassured users that their funds would be accessible once block production resumes.
The outage occurred shortly after the project was scheduled to implement the Callisto upgrade on August 9th. This upgrade was aimed at improving block production times and was the first in a series of updates to enhance the network’s efficiency. It is unclear whether the upgrade played a role in the outage.
On August 13th, Canto briefly resumed block production before stopping again at block height 10,848,199. This time, the project attributed the halt to “unforeseen secondary effects,” stating that validators in the network had stopped the network after upgrading to v8. The development team, B-harvest, is working on v8.1.0 of the validator protocol to address the issue, with block production expected to resume by the end of the day.
Despite the back-to-back outages, the price of CANTO, the network’s native token, saw a significant increase of 38.2% over the past day and over 43% in the past week. Canto is not the only network to have experienced an outage recently, as Ethereum layer 2 solution Starknet and Solana also faced disruptions.
Launched in August 2022, Canto had surpassed $200 million in total value locked by March 2023. However, the project’s TVL has dropped to $14.58 million according to DefiLlama data. The team continues to work on resolving the issues and improving the network’s performance to ensure a smooth operation in the future.