Several Stellar Nodes Go Offline, Team Says Network ‘Still Functioning’ Though Some Transactions Fail

Update: As of April 7, 2021, 18:28 UTC, according to the Stellar website, SDF horizon service has been restored and the SDF validators have been brought back online.

Some of the nodes used to validate transactions on the Stellar Lumens blockchain went offline Tuesday, reportedly leading exchanges to halt withdrawals as certain transactions failed even as others got through.

Anton Cashchin, a managing partner at U.K.-based CEX exchange, sounded the alarm when he tweeted that “several validators” went offline, leading Binance, Bitfinex and Bitstamp to halt withdrawals.

Cashchin claimed the outage disrupted transactions and exchange withdrawals, though Stellar issued a statement that “the Stellar network is still online, and transactions are continuing to be processed.”

“Around 1:00 a.m. PDT, the Stellar Development Foundation's validator nodes and the SDF's public Horizon API instance went offline … SDF's engineering team is working to determine the cause and to resolve the issue, in addition to working with all Tier 1 validators on the network,” Stellar’s blog reads.

According to public data at block explorer Stellar Expert, the network is still processing transactions, though not at a normal rate. A block validated around the time nodes fell off the network showed more than half of the submitted transactions as failed, but the network appears to have recovered as newly processed blocks indicate no failed transactions

Stellarbeat takes the pulse of the network’s node count. At press time, the website showed that more than half of Stellar’s usually active nodes are currently down.

At 6:59 a.m. ET, Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino tweeted that XLM withdrawals were paused.

Stellar’s team responded to CoinDesk’s request for comment with its official statement. It clarified that XLM transactions are being processed and the network is still up.

Nevertheless, XLM, the coin that underpins the Stellar network, fell from $0.58 to $0.51 on the news.

Notably, Coinbase is reportedly using XLM as part of its rewards debit card, which offers either 1% back on bitcoin or 4% in XLM, according to the Wall Street Journal.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Updated April 6, 2021, 17:54 UTC: This article and headline was updated to include information about failed transactions on the Stellar network.