dYdX Chain resumes block production after 9.5 hour halt

The halt was caused by the wrong version of a bug fix being included in an upgrade

April 8, 2024 01:31 pm

Sanjay kj/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks

DYdX Chain, the blockchain built to house the perpetual futures exchange dYdX, experienced a “major outage” beginning early Monday morning. DYdX said the chain halt was caused by a scheduled v4 upgrade to the chain.

After nearly nine hours of downtime, dYdX released a fix for the software bug, and enough validators got on board that dYdX resumed block production midday Monday. All-told, the outage lasted nine hours and 32 minutes, according to dYdX’s status page.

DYdX said the fix is not a state-breaking change, meaning that the software’s compatibility with earlier versions of the blockchain will be preserved. DYdX’s perpetual futures DEX remained operational throughout the chain halt.

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The chain halted because the wrong version of a bug fix in Cosmos’ IAVL library was included in the dYdX software release. This caused a corruption in the network’s state during the upgrade, Dimitar Petkov, the DeFi technical project lead in dYdX’s Operations subDAO, told Blockworks.

With the halt, dYdX becomes the latest blockchain to experience disruption in recent weeks, joining Solana and Polygon zkEVM.

Strangely enough, the price of dYdX’s native token (DYDX) climbed after the chain halt began at around 3:00 am ET Monday — seeing about a 4% bump overall.

DYdX Chain’s v4 upgrade made some minor updates to the trading platform and introduced a means for malicious validators to be slashed via governance vote. It passed in a nearly-unanimous community vote last week. The upgrade’s “scheduled maintenance report” acknowledged the possibility that a disruption could be caused by v4.

The Cosmos-built dYdX chain is an app-chain, or a blockchain built to support a specific application — in this case, dYdX’s derivatives platform. The chain entered its beta stage in November and began allowing liquid staking for its native dYdX token in January.

DYdX passed a proposal in March to stake 20 million dYdX from its treasury — worth around $64 million at current prices — with Cosmos liquid staking platform Stride.

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