L2 Network Blast Suffers Outage Related to Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade

The layer 2 blockchain network, which has nearly $3 billion in total locked value, stopped producing blocks minutes after Ethereum activated its hard fork Dencun upgrade. But it was back up a little more than an hour later.

Blast is the third largest layer 2 blockchain network by total value locked in its smart contract with nearly $3 billion.

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Posted March 13, 2024 at 12:05 pm EST.

Layer 2 blockchain network Blast suffered an outage Wednesday morning related to Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade. According to blockchain explorer Blastscan, the Ethereum rollup stopped producing blocks at 10:05 a.m. EST. It had resumed block production by 11:19 a.m.

“The Blast Mainnet has stopped producing blocks due to issues related to Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade,” wrote the Blast team on X. “Core engineering contributors are working on a fix. We’ll share an update and post-mortem once the fix is live.” The Blast team further stated that a fix could be expected within 30 to 60 minutes. Block production resumed roughly 40 minutes after the announcement.

Blast founder Tieshun “Pacman” Roquerre did not immediately respond to a request to comment.

Blast’s outage began only minutes after Ethereum activated its hard fork Dencun upgrade, which is expected to drive down the costs for transacting on layer 2 networks built atop Ethereum’s base layer.

The Ethereum Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the issues faced by Blast and whether they are affecting any other blockchains.

Blast is the third largest layer 2 blockchain network by total value locked in its smart contract with nearly $3 billion, behind Arbitrum and Optimism, according to data from blockchain analytics website L2Beat.