Sui Crypto Price Remains Stable Despite Network Outage Issues

Sui network witnessed its first-ever disruption on 21 November 2024 even as Sui crypto price showed signs of stability. This unexpected outage, which lasted approximately two and a half hours, halted all Sui Mainnet activities at the time.

Both validators, the important nodes that are ensuring the work of the network at the moment, got stuck in the crash loop. Moreover, the system could not process any transactions at all.

The Root Cause: A Congestion Control Bug

The root cause of the situation was a congestion control system bug in Sui, built in recent updates in the TotalGasBudgetWithCap mode.

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The congestion control mechanism is one of the fundamental aspects of Sui’s architecture. It allows the system to properly distribute the transaction load and control it by preventing a large number of transactions per second from writing to a single object.

It helps to keep the network maintained and functional, especially during high traffic within the network transactions.

However, at the same time, it created a new vulnerability. An unfortunate side effect of the new system was that when specific conditions were met, validators would cease to run.

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The condition was first activated when the network handled a transaction with the use of a mutable shared object and a lack of zero MoveCall commands.

That’s a bug only known to occur a few times in a year. It leads to validators freezing at the same time, thus, stalling the whole network. This virus was brought in during the most recent protocol upgrade and accidentally triggered.

The Outage and Response

The outage affected all the functions of the SUI ecosystem, as transaction processing and all validators stopped. The Sui engineering team was alerted by notifications from the network, as well as the report received from the community that forced action.

It did not take the team long to trace the delay-based problem to the congestion control bug. Solving the issue once diagnosed only required a simple code correction that, once done, was released through Pull Request #20365.

To get back to operations, the engineering team deployed a new code update for the Mainnet and Testnet. The fix was released in versions 1.37.4 of Mainnet and 1.38.1 of Testnet.

To make the update, validators reacted promptly and the network could be activated in a mere 15 minutes after the fix’s release.

According to the Sui team, a large portion of the outage time was dedicated to waiting for the release binaries to build and deploy. That called for the optimization of the network workflows to provide fixes during some critical incidents faster.

Resilience in the Face of Challenges: SUI Crypto Price Performance

While considering the technical issues and the temporary disruption of the network’s activities, SUI, the token native to the Sui network, has proven rather stable.

The token remained within its recent range as it was trading at $3.55 at press time. That represented a 0.88% daily rise. Fluctuating at $10.11 billion, SUI maintained a strong 24-hour trading volume of $1.88 billion at the time of writing.

As per the technical chart, the Sui crypto price had an early November uptrend. It had a strong look of an upward breakout.

After the breakout, the price ranged sideways, as the blue-shaded areas depicted above. That means the moment has confused the market after creating a great rise.

At that time we saw a relative high in parallel with the lower boundary of the second range of consolidation.

On the other hand, the AO indicated a shift from negative strength during the rally, and a bullish histogram started.

The recent green bars pointed to slowly diminishing growth. However, in case new negative bars appear – it would mean an actively dampening price movement.