zkSync Era: Of halted production and its aftermath

Journalist

Posted: December 18, 2023

• The number of transactions on zkSync Era surged to over 5 million.
• TVL and volume remained the same despite the surge in transactions.

The zkSync Era experienced a temporary halt in its block production, as reported recently. This incident marked the second disruption in operations for an L2 platform within 48 hours.

zkSync Era pause block production

As per explorer.zksync, zkSync Era temporarily ceased block production on 16 December. An analysis showed that block production was suspended for more than an hour during this period.

This interruption coincided with the total transaction count reaching around 194.5 million. However, block production has resumed as of this writing, and regular operational activities have been reinstated.

The total number of transactions was over 200 million as of this writing.

Reasons for the pause

An examination of zkSync Era’s transactions through Dune Analytics showed a notable trend. On the 16th of December, the transaction volume rose to one of its highest points — over 5.1 million successful transactions.

Before this surge, the average daily transaction count was around 1 million. The sudden rise overwhelmed the network, causing a temporary pause in block production.

This occurrence was similar to what happened on the Arbitrum [ARB] L2 network, which also experienced a sudden rise in transactions, leading to a network pause, as reported earlier by AMBCrypto.

The common factor behind these disruptions was identified as “Inscriptions.” Like Arbitrum, the network encountered a sudden rise in transactions due to Inscriptions.

According to a post by Hildobby, the zkSync Era experienced a sudden rise of over 400,000 inscriptions per hour. This aligned with a broader trend of transaction disruption caused by inscriptions.

Source: Dune Analytics

Despite the challenges, the zkSync Era demonstrated resilience by successfully managing the increased traffic. This was evident in the subsequent resumption of block production.

zkSync’s TVL and volume remains steady

L2 Beats data showed that despite the recent surge in transactions, there has been no change in the Total Value Locked (TVL) for the zkSync Era. The latest information showed a decrease of over 9% in the TVL over the last 24 hours.

As of this writing, the decrease brought the TVL to around $504 million. Despite this decline, zkSync Era retained its position as the fourth-largest Layer 2 (L2) platform, with a daily volume of around $41 million.