Avalanche Suffers Outage, Fails to Produce Block for Almost Two Hours

Layer-1 network Avalanche has failed to produce a block for almost two hours, according to its status page.

Ava Labs co-founder Kevin Sekniqi said the issue “seems to be related to a new inscription wave. Inscriptions are a way of recording arbitrary data on the blockchain without the use of smart contracts. They initially emerged on bitcoin as it allowed users to effectively mint NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain.

“Developers across the community are currently investigating a stall in block finalization that is preventing blocks from being accepted on the Primary Network,” a notice on Avalanche’s website states.

The network’s native token (AVAX) is down by 1.5% since the last block was produced, according to TradingView.

Rival blockchain Solana had a five-hour outage earlier this month as it suffered under heavy congestion.