zkSync Era faces block production failure, resumes with increased TVL

zkSync Era experienced block failure just over a week after its launch.
The team resolved the issue in five minutes, introduced alerts, and plans to decentralize the platform while TVL surges.

The much-anticipated launch of the ZkSync Era on 24 March was expected to revolutionize Ethereum transactions by introducing a new dimension. However, over a week after its debut, the zero-knowledge platform experienced a hiccup when it failed to generate blocks for a few hours.

Zero knowledge with zero blocks

As of 1 April, which marked eight days since the zkSync Era was launched, there were reports that the L2 platform ceased generating blocks.

The zkSync Era Block Explorer transaction data indicated that from 01:52 AM CET to 6:02 AM CET on 1 April no blocks were created on the mainnet blockchain of zkSync Era.

Source: explorer.zkync.io

Blockchain networks experiencing block production failures are not new, as demonstrated by the recent block failure on the Avalanche network.

However, the situation with zkSync Era drew attention due to the short period between its launch and the block failure. It is worth noting that the network was still in alpha, which the team acknowledged in their response.

Reasons, fixes for the block failure

As per the zkSync Era team’s statement, the block queue database malfunctioned, suspending the block production. Unfortunately, the health alert for the database was not activated as it could not connect to collect metrics. However, the API was functioning normally which explains why the alerts were not triggered.

The team has confirmed that they resolved the failure within a five-minute timeframe. They introduced alerts that will notify when the monitoring agent malfunctions or cannot set up a connection to collect metrics.

The team also stated they had implemented other solutions to address the issue. However, they admitted that the ultimate solution would be decentralizing the platform.

zkSync Era resumes normal activities

As of this writing, regular activities resumed on the network following the block production downtime. Despite the temporary setback, the L2 solution maintained its position among the top three L2 networks, as reported by L2Beat.

According to data from Oklink explorer, the network facilitated nearly 9,000 transactions, with over 4,000 addresses registered on the platform and eight active addresses.

Furthermore, based on data from DefiLlama, zkSync Era has been experiencing an upward trend in its Total Value Locked (TVL). As of this writing, TVL reached $41.32 million, reflecting a 17.15% increase within the last 24 hours.