dYdX Chain Outage Continues Amidst Upgrade Complications

Decentralized finance protocol dYdX is investigating a halt in block production that occurred after a scheduled chain upgrade. The issue arose on April 8 at 05:30 UTC, with the chain failing to resume block production as expected. The dYdX team is currently debugging the issue, but no resolution is expected until later.

dYdX Chain Outage Prolonged as Upgrade Complications Persist

07:45 UTC, April 8, 2023

The decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol dYdX is experiencing an extended disruption in block production following a scheduled protocol upgrade.

At 05:30 UTC on April 8, dYdX announced the commencement of a planned upgrade, anticipating potential disruptions to the dYdX Chain's functionalities. However, the chain did not resume block production as expected after the scheduled maintenance period.

"The issue continues to be investigated," stated dYdX at 6:50 UTC. "It's been agreed to reconvene with the validators around 15:00 UTC. This means that the devs won't suggest a workaround or a fix until then so that the validators won't get jailed for not being online when the chain restarts."

According to Nodes Guru, a blockchain explorer platform, the latest blocks produced by the dYdX mainnet were recorded at the time of the scheduled upgrade, indicating a five-hour outage.

This outage follows a recent community-approved staking of 20 million DYDX tokens. On April 6, the dYdX community voted to allow $61 million in treasury tokens to be staked on the liquid staking protocol called Stride.

"The rate of DYDX being staked to validators has plateaued and deposits to the exchange are growing at a tremendous pace," explained dYdX.

In November 2023, the dYdX chain suffered a targeted attack resulting in losses of approximately $9 million. On January 3, the protocol announced that it had identified the attacker and was considering legal action. Additionally, dYdX implemented enhancements to its trading platform for improved monitoring and alerts.

The ongoing outage underscores the challenges associated with maintaining the stability and resilience of blockchain networks. The DeFi industry has witnessed several notable outages in recent months, including those affecting Solana, Polygon, and Avalanche.

As the DeFi ecosystem continues to expand and attract wider adoption, the robustness and reliability of its underlying infrastructure become increasingly crucial. Developers and ecosystem participants are actively working on solutions to enhance the stability and security of blockchain networks to mitigate the impact of such disruptions.

The latest updates on the dYdX Chain outage will be disseminated as they become available.