Ethereum (ETH) Layer-2 Scaling Solution Arbitrum (ARB) Suffers ‘Major Outage’ Amid Surge in Traffic

Arbitrum (ARB), a popular Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 scaling solution, suffered a major outage on Friday morning amid a “significant” surge in network traffic.

The protocol’s sequencer, which is responsible for ordering users’ transactions, stalled at 7:29 a.m. PST and didn’t resume operations until 8:57 a.m., according to Arbitrum’s status page.

The layer-2 scaling solution says it plans to release a post-mortem on the outage as soon as possible.

“The team is actively investigating, but we can confirm that a sustained surge of inscriptions triggered the sequencer to stop relaying transactions properly.”

Though the protocol resumed operations at 8:57 a.m., Arbitrum’s gas prices didn’t stabilize until around 1 p.m. PST.

The project’s native token, ARB, is down more than 6% in the past 24 hours, roughly double the average crypto price movement on Friday. The overall crypto market cap dropped 3.2% over the same period, according to CoinGecko.

Arbitrum currently ranks fourth among all chains in terms of total value locked (TVL), behind Ethereum, Tron (TRX) and Binance Smart Chain (BSC), according to the decentralized finance tracker DeFi Llama. The project currently registers $2.345 billion in TVL.

TVL refers to the amount of capital deposited within a protocol’s smart contracts and is often used to gauge the health of a crypto ecosystem.

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