The Ethereum blockchain suffered from a technical issue on Friday that caused the network to stop finalizing blocks for over an hour, the second such outage in the past 24 hours.
The incident – the cause of which remains a matter of speculation – sparked major security concerns for users of the second-largest blockchain by market capitalization. According to the Ethereum Foundation, when blocks are not being finalized, it is possible that pending transactions might be re-ordered or dropped from the network.
The network had resumed finalizing blocks at press time, but this is the second time Ethereum has seen a hit to its performance in 24 hours – the chain experienced the same issue Thursday, when finality paused for roughly 25 minutes.
According to Superphiz.eth, self-proclaimed “Ethereum Beacon Chain community health consultant,” transactions were not halted Thursday and continued to be processed during the downtime. The lack of finality technically had “zero impact on-chain activity,” he tweeted.
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Some of the services built atop Ethereum – which hosts a multi-billion-dollar network of financial infrastructure and other applications – were forced to modify operations as a result of today’s finality issues. DYdX, a leading decentralized exchange platform, says it paused deposits temporarily due to the lack of Ethereum finality and were “continuing to monitor and investigate this issue.”
