Celo Grinds to a Halt, Validators “Working to Restart the Network”

The Celo blockchain has been down for more than 13 hours.

Celo Suffers Ongoing Outage

The Celo blockchain has been unable to process transactions for over 13 hours.

According to on-chain data, the Proof-of-Stake-based blockchain suddenly stopped producing blocks at around 23:20 UTC on Thursday, or more specifically, at a block height of 14,035,019. Celo reported the outage early this morning on Twitter, saying that the network’s validators are “working to identify and resolve the issue,” without explaining the reason for the halt.

After about ten hours of downtime, the network briefly restarted at around 08:39 UTC this morning, only to fail processing transactions about a dozen blocks or roughly two minutes later. Since the second outage this morning, Celo has posted another update on Twitter, clarifying that validators are still working to bring the network back online. It said:

“Validators are working to restart the network. Block production resumed briefly, however stalled again. Validators, please join the validators-operators channel on Discord and follow the posted instructions to update your node. As previously stated, all funds are secure.”

Launched in May 2020, Celo is a Proof-of-Stake-based blockchain fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It features an ultralight client designed for mobile and can process transaction fee payments in various tokens and stablecoins besides the native coin CELO. According to DeFi Llama data, Celo has about $129 million in total value locked across DeFi applications on its network. In comparison, the leading smart contract-enabled blockchain, Ethereum, current hosts about $33 billion worth of assets.

With the network unable to process blocks, the $129 million in crypto assets staked in decentralized applications on the platform are currently locked and unable to be withdrawn to exchanges or other blockchain networks through cross-chain bridges.

Interestingly, the CELO token, which has a market capitalization of around $375 million, has not reacted negatively to the news of the outage. It is currently changing hands for approximately $0.83 per coin, up by about 0.6% on the day.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this article owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.