Layer 2 Starknet Recovers After Four-Hour Outage

Starknet, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, recently experienced two outages, with one lasting over four hours. The project’s official X account noted in an X post on Tuesday evening that Starknet is back “fully operational again,” without elaborating on the cause of the incidents.

“Block production has resumed normal operation. Transactions submitted between 10:21–10:45 am UTC were not processed, and the chain has been rolled back to block 1962681,” the X post reads.

Starknet pledged to provide a “full retrospective with details on the incident, its cause, and preventive measures” soon. StarkWare, the company behind Starknet, did not respond to The Defiant’s request for comment by press time.

At the time of writing, the price of (STRK), Starknet’s token, is down 6% for the week at $0.12, trading more than 90% below its early 2024 launch price.

The exact cause of the outage remains unclear, as there were no indications that the network was overwhelmed by a surge in user demand. Data from Token Terminal shows that Starknet had fewer than 4,000 active users on Sept. 1, a 98% decline from its peak of over 230,000 daily active users in September 2023.

Grinta Upgrade

Blockchain analytics firm Messari noted in an intel alert shared with The Defiant that the downtime followed the deployment of Starknet’s “Grinta” upgrade.

“A series of ‘idle gateway’ alerts followed by multiple ‘slow block creation’ alerts have been issued since the upgrade occurred,” Messari wrote.

The upgrade replaced the network’s single sequencer with a three-node Tendermint consensus system and introduced “pre-confirmations,” which provide users with near-instant feedback by giving transactions a temporary status within half a second.

Starknet claims the Grinta upgrade significantly speeds up block production, while also incorporating a new fee market based on Ethereum’s EIP-1559 burn mechanism.