The Cardano blockchain experienced an anomaly on Saturday afternoon (07:00 pm EST, between blocks 8300569 and 8300570) that caused close to 60% of all active nodes to go offline for a short period of time. When the block is not stopped, there is a delay in the transaction. But what happened and why?
One of the first to report the anomaly was Tom Stokes, founder and COO of Node Shark and operator of the ADA stock pool. They write: “A few hours ago more than half of all Cardano nodes went offline. This is why decentralization is important,” and showed the chart below.
As shown in the graph above, the network recovered about 87% in a short period of time. However, the cause of the incident remained unknown for a long time. At press time, Cardano’s inventor, Charles Hoskinson, had also not commented.
Cardano developers IOG responded
A statement from the development company behind Cardano, Input Output Global (IOG), provides an explanation for the phenomenon. The company explained that the bug caused more than 50% of nodes to disconnect and restart.
“The affected relay node and the block-generating node – the edge node does not appear to be affected,” the IOG said, explaining that it appears to have been triggered by a temporary anomaly that caused one of two reactions in the node. ; some disconnect from the peer, others throw an exception and restart.
According to Cardano developers, this is an unrelated event:
Such transient problems (even if they will affect all nodes) are considered in the design of cardano-nodes and consensus. The system behaves as expected.
Block production is only momentarily affected due to some networks being out of sync for about https://cardanoscan.io/block/8300569 before nodes are restarted.
As the company emphasizes, the impact is rather small – “similar to the delays that occur during normal operations and often appear at the boundaries of time.”
Most nodes recover automatically without human intervention and restart, depending on the staking pool selection. However, the company promised to further investigate the cause of the anomaly and implement additional monitoring logging measures in addition to “regular” monitoring procedures.
In the community, the incident sparked a discussion about the decentralization of the network and whether the anomaly is troubling. One user wrote that the incident was unusual and had never happened before on Cardano.
“There was one time when the inefficient reward calculation over the time limit slowed down the nodes, that’s about it” the user explained. In general, however, the community agrees that the impact is minimal, as the block created is only slowed down for a few minutes while the node is rebooting.
But regarding the decentralization of the network, some users expressed concern. Some say that the event shows that Cardano’s node diversity is not good enough. The only reason not all nodes go down is because not all nodes receive incoming connections. “Survivability here is not due to node diversity, but node strength,” another user added.
Cardano (ADA) price Today
ADA’s 1-day chart shows a breakout from a downtrend that has lasted more than eight months. The next main price target is the zone between $0.42 and $0.43, where the former strong support that has become resistance meets the 200-day EMA. At press time, ADA was trading at $0.374.
Featured images from Michael Fortsch/Unsplash, Charts from TradingView.com