The Celo blockchain has experienced its first network outage since its transition to its mainnet, and it lasted no less than 24 hours. The reasons have not yet been revealed, but the network validators had to perform two consecutive updates before they could restart block production.
Celo blockchain down for a day
Celo, a blockchain running on the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus, was down for 24 hours before coming back online early this morning, Friday, July 15.
Block production was first stopped at block #14,035,19 on July 14 at around 2am for an as yet unknown reason, before restarting 9 hours later. But this was short-lived: block production was interrupted again just a few minutes later, at block n° 14,035,44.
It should be noted that only the block production was impacted, all the applications of the network continued to function without observing any abnormal event.
The team in charge of the blockchain was anxious to reassure its users through an assiduous communication on the Twitter network, assuring several times that “the funds were safe”.
The production of blocks was able to return to normal almost 24 hours after the beginning of its interruption, this morning around 2am. No technical details have been revealed yet from Celo, but according to the press releases, the validator nodes had to restart the network after performing the 1.5.7 and 1.5.8 updates.
As reported by the Celo team on Twitter, this is the first outage in over 2 years for the network. A more specific statement regarding the reasons that led to such a long outage is also expected:
“Celo validators have resolved the first network outage since the mainnet was launched on April 22, 2020. A thorough and expedited technical analysis is underway and details will be shared with the Celo community shortly.”
Celo, a blockchain with a unique concept
Launched in early 2020, Celo is a blockchain that allows users to make cryptocurrency transactions via their cell phone by assigning it to a public key. Through its Valora app, Celo makes it possible, for example, to simply send cryptocurrency to one’s contacts, without them even having a wallet.
According to data from its block explorer, the Celo blockchain will soon display 16 million wallet addresses, with an average time of 5 seconds per block validation. In addition, it is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which allows it to benefit from a very large ecosystem of decentralized applications (dApps) as well as native interoperability with blockchains that are also decentralized.
As said before, this is the first outage for Celo since its transition to its mainnet. On the Discord channel of the network’s validators, used to transmit information about the blockchain’s reboot, one of them pointed out that outages are part of the normal development process of such a project. He adds:
“Even Visa has experienced network outages in the last two years despite being a leader in the payments market for over 60 years.”
Cryptocurrency CELO, however, has been unaffected by the news, even posting +5.4% over the past 24 hours. It is currently observing a price of $0.89, with a market capitalization of $402 million, placing it in 101st place on the chart.
