Degen Chain, an Ethereum-based L3, is currently in the midst of a downtime. As a result, block production on the chain has come to a standstill. As of press time, the network utilization was null and void, with 15524773 being the last block produced.
The latest transaction was validated on the L3 network around 12 hours back. Based on Arbitrum’s Orbit, Degen Chain uses Base for settlements. Parallelly, AnyTrust protocol caters to its data availability needs.
The chain uses its own native token, DEGEN [ERC-20 token on Base], for gas fees. Interestingly this token was brought to life on the Farcaster Degen channel at the beginning of this year. With a market cap of 238 million, the token is currently a part of the top-300 crypto list. Despite the operational hitch, the token was trading in green at press time around $0.0191, after registering a 4.7% spike over the past day.
Postmortem Being Conducted
Degen Chain was put to sea in March this year by Syndicate. In just a matter of days, the protocol’s TVL shot to $10.5 million. However, the merry days failed to prolong, and the amount locked has been on a downtrend since then. At press time, this metric flashed a value of $2.6 million.
Will Papper, the Co-founder of Syndicate revealed on Farcaster that Web3 infra platform Conduit has been working to get things back on track. A couple of hours after his first announcement, he added that the chain had been taken down by the team and the issue would likely be resolved by the end of the day. Furthermore, he went on to reveal,
“A 500K block reorg occurred. Conduit is working on a postmortem.”
People from the space were puzzled about the whole 500k block reorg aspect. A reorg typically takes place whenever there’s a conflict in the chain. It transpires when validators disagree on which is the most accurate version of the chain when multiple blocks are produced simultaneously. Ultimately, the weaker version is wiped off the picture.
Chalking out what could have potentially happened, yield farmer and angel investor Valentin Mihov posted on X [formerly Twitter],
“The issue should be purely on the L3 side. Looks like an ops problem on Conduit + lack of sufficient monitoring from the bridge providers. There is a reason for the 7 day finality deadline on the optimistic rollups.”
