Polygon zkEVM Suffers Extended Outage

Polygon zkEVM, a protocol that aims to provide scaling solutions for Ethereum-based decentralized apps, is currently experiencing an ongoing outage.

Current evidence from in-house Explorer has it that Polygon zkEVM is having an outage that has rendered it inactive for more than 12 hours on Saturday. 

Polygon zkEVM, the New Protocol Battling Outage

Polygon zkEVM, which is natively compatible with ERC-20-based apps, was launched over a year ago, on March 27, 2023. It offers a scaling solution for decentralized apps (DApps) that run on the Ethereum network. Over the past year, Polygon zkEVM has failed to garner the same level of attention as other Layer-2 applications during the same period.

Per data reference, the protocol has witnessed fewer transactions than many of its competitors in the past.

As exhibited, the Layer-2 blockchain was unable to correctly sequence or add more blocks during the ongoing outage. Data from numerous block explorers suggests that the last time a block was added to the chain was more than 12 hours ago. The company behind the Polygon zkEVM has yet to offer any explanation for the abrupt outage. 

However, there is a message on the zkEVM part of Polygonscan that reads: 

“The zkEVM mainnet network is currently on-going unscheduled maintenance; block data might not be up-to-date.”

Core Reasons for Multiple Outages Remain Unknown

It is not yet certain if the explanation of “on-going unscheduled maintenance” is the genuine reason for the outage. 

Notably, the crypto sector has actually been subject to outages in recent weeks, with Coinbase and Solana at the core of it. A recent downtime in the Coinbase ecosystem drained about $100 billion in market value from the overall crypto capitalization.

A recurrence occurred soon after Bitcoin’s price hit its all-time high. Within 24 hours, Downdetector received a large number of issue reports describing the Coinbase outage.

Crypto blogger MartyParty attributed the downtime to the company’s use of subpar tools and technology. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong queased consumer concerns by saying the company will be investing in improved infrastructure to handle its enormous demand.

The Solana platform went down for around five hours in February due to one of many outages that affected the service. Market watchers assert that these outages are intensifying and demand immediate attention to prevent their devastation of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

It might have a detrimental influence on the value of the underlying cryptocurrency as well. The news of the downtime has not hit Polygon MATIC as hard as expected; at the time of writing, it was trading at $0.9926, up 3.22% in the last 24 hours.