Polygon Foundation Links Network Outage to ‘Validator Exit’

Ethereum scaling solution Polygon was disrupted for over an hour on Wednesday after a validator leaving the network triggered an unexpected bug.

In a since-deleted post on X, the Polygon Foundation said a “validator exit” temporarily prevented Heimdall, the network’s validation layer, from being able to progress. Polygon’s proof-of-stake chain, Bor, was still able to produce blocks, however, it said.

A spokesperson for the Polygon Foundation told Decrypt that the post was replaced with a new one that “explains the situation in greater detail,” but the organization’s latest statement did not explain what initially caused the issue for the network.

In the subsequent post, the Polygon Foundation said that it is actively collaborating with network participants to restore user-facing services affected by the bug. As of 3 p.m. ET, the statement indicated that those services had not fully returned to normal.

At $1.9 billion, Polygon’s POL token, formerly MATIC, is the 66th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko. Over the past 24 hours, its price has decreased 2%, with the token recently changing hands around $0.21.

Earlier this month, Polygon underwent an upgrade billed by Polygon Foundation founder and CEO Sandeep Naiwal as its most “technically complex” change in history. It reduced the amount of blocks that it takes for a transaction to finalize on Polygon, while also upgrading Heimdall to a newer version of Cosmos’ open-source toolkit, he said on X.

Around $1.2 billion worth of digital assets are being used in decentralized finance, or DeFi, protocols on Polygon, according to crypto data provider DefiLlama. The network also supports $2.8 billion in stablecoins.

Validators are responsible for validating transactions on Polygon, playing a crucial role in maintaining the network’s securities. On networks like Ethereum, a validator leaving the network has never caused the network’s consensus to grind to a halt.

Polygon’s zkEVM network, which is being deprecated soon, went offline for 10 hours last year, per the publication Unchained. In March of 2022, a node issue knocked Polygon offline for around 11 hours.

Blockchain outages aren’t too rare, but they can hurt a network’s reputation as a reliable way to send transactions, plaguing networks like Solana for years. And they can cause alarm among investors if it means that they can no longer access their funds.