Ethereum News Today: Starknet's Sequencer Freeze Exposes L2 Reliability Woes

Starknet, a zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup layer-2 (L2) scaling solution for Ethereum, has fully restored operations after suffering an unexpected outage lasting over two hours. The network rolled back its blockchain to block height 1,960,612, requiring all affected transactions to be resubmitted. The disruption, which occurred on Tuesday, impacted transaction processing between 2:23 am and 4:36 am UTC and raised concerns over the reliability of the platform, which holds $548 million in total value locked (TVL) as of the latest available data [1].

The outage was attributed to a failure of the sequencer, a critical component responsible for ordering and processing transactions before they are committed to the blockchain. According to status.starknet.io, the sequencer was unable to process the “Cairo0 code,” leading to a freeze in block production and transaction confirmations. This marked the second significant outage in two months, following a previous incident on July 18, when the network experienced a 13-minute slowdown due to a slow gateway and delayed block creation [1].

Starknet’s community-run X account reported that services had resumed by late Tuesday, with block production returning to normal and most RPC providers operational. A blockchain reorganization was initiated to restore consistency, erasing all unprocessed transactions from the affected period. Users who submitted transactions during the outage must now resubmit them for inclusion in the updated blockchain. The team has pledged to publish a detailed incident report, including the root cause of the failure and measures to prevent similar disruptions in the future [1].

The outage also had a short-term impact on STRK, the native token of Starknet. STRK dropped approximately 4.5% to $0.1204 during the disruption before recovering to around $0.1234 at the time of reporting. This volatility underscores the sensitivity of the network's token to operational issues, particularly as the platform seeks to attract broader adoption and institutional participation [2].

The incident occurred shortly after the deployment of the Grinta upgrade, also known as version 0.14.0, which aimed to enhance the network’s performance and move toward greater decentralization. While the upgrade did not achieve its intended improvements in the short term, developers have emphasized that it is part of a broader strategy to transition from a centralized sequencer model to a more decentralized framework. The roadmap envisions a future where block validation and production are distributed across multiple independent nodes, reducing dependency on a single entity [2].

Starknet continues to play a key role in Ethereum’s L2 ecosystem, leveraging STARK proofs to enable high-throughput, low-cost transactions. Despite the recent outage, the network remains Ethereum's seventh-largest L2, with a TVL of $548 million as of the latest data [1]. Analysts will be closely watching how the platform addresses the reliability concerns raised by this incident, particularly as it moves toward full decentralization and increased user adoption.

Source:

[1] Ethereum L2 Starknet suffers 2nd mainnet outage in 2 (https://cointelegraph.com/news/starknet-outage-ethereum-l2-reliability-concerns)

[2] Starknet Is Back Online After Outage: What Happened? (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/starknet-back-online-outage-happened-121305328.html)