Avalanche Developers Rush Client Patch as 'Bug' Slows Blockchain Transactions

A "cross-chain finality" bug has forced the network into "self-healing mode."

Feb 11, 2021 at 3:35 p.m. UTC

Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 12:10 p.m. UTC

The Avalanche network has come to a near halt after “a bug in the cross-chain functionality” code that enables the Avalanche protocol and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to speak with each other failed under high loads, according to the Avalanche developer team on Reddit.

The release of Avalanche's newest decentralized finance (DeFi) product, money market Pangolin, snowballed into “insane load" for the network, which further "triggered a very low probability bug that produced a bad state in the network,” the team said on Reddit.

The ability to send transactions has crawled to a halt with some users reporting wait times of up to four hours for finalizing a transaction. Funds are safe, however.

The network has gone into a “self-healing” mode after the bug “caused the entire network to panic.” The team maintains nothing with the core protocol itself is wrong.

Avalanche developers worked overnight on the code break, but will only push an update once the team is “100% confident” it will address the problem.

The Avalanche developer team did not return answers to questions by press time.

This is a developing situation and will be updated.

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