Canto blockchain struggles to restart following outage

Canto, a layer-1 general-purpose blockchain network, has been experiencing difficulties restarting block production since August 11.

The network stopped producing blocks at block 10847516, according to data from Canto Explorer. Later, in an X post published on August 12, the project said it was experiencing a “problem with consensus” and that an upgrade would be implemented to fix the issue.

The Canto chain is currently experiencing a consensus issue that is causing the chain to stall.

An upgrade to fix this issue will be rolled out on Monday, August 12 at 12:00 UTC.

All funds are safe. Once the chain restarts, users will have access to all activities as…

— Song (@CantoPublic) August 11, 2024

A consensus mechanism is a process used to verify the authenticity of transactions in blockchain networks. It prevents fraud and double-spending by ensuring that all network participants have a consistent and accurate record of the blockchain’s data.

Canto did not disclose exact details about what caused the outage but assured users that all funds were safe and would be accessible once block production resumed.

The outage comes just a day after the project rolled out its Callisto upgrade at 14:30 UTC on August 9. The upgrade is expected to improve block production times and was the first official upgrade in a series of updates aimed at improving the network’s efficiency.

The Callisto upgrade proposal has been accepted and will occur tomorrow Friday around 14:30 UTC, although there may be a difference of 10 to 15 minutes due to different block times.

— son➕ (@abovethebias) August 8, 2024

It is currently unknown whether the upgrade has been fully implemented or whether it is contributing to the current outage.

On August 13, Canto briefly resumed block production on August 12 before stalling again at block height 10,848,199. This time, the project cited “unforeseen secondary effects” as the culprit, stating that validators on its network “halted the network after upgrading to v8.”

Canto’s development team, B-harvest, is reportedly working on v8.1.0 of its validator protocol, a critical component that determines how validators operate. Block production is expected to resume by the end of the day.

Launched in August 2022, Canto managed to surpass $200 million in total value locked in March 2023. Since then, the project’s TVL has dropped to $14.58 million, according to DefiLlama data.

The price of CANTO, the network’s native token, has increased by 38.2% in the past day and over 43% in the past week, despite repeated outages.

Canto isn’t the only network to experience an outage this month. Last week, Ethereum layer 2 solution Starknet stopped producing blocks for the first time since launch. The outage was caused by a rounding error that caused blocks to be reorganized, creating a backlog of transactions.

Solana, which has long been plagued by outages, was out for about five hours earlier this year on Feb. 6.