- On December 15, the Arbtitrum One sequencer failed.
- The failure occurred due to a surge in network activity.
- The latter was dictated by the growing demand for “inscriptions”.
On December 15, 2023, the Arbitrum One L2 network was out of order for an hour and a half. The reason was a malfunction of the sequencer, dictated by a surge in activity.
During the day, from December 14 to 15, the number of transactions on the network increased from 680,000 to 4.9 million. The growth rate continued on December 16, reaching 5.09 million, according to Arbiscan:
A sharp jump in network activity occurred against the backdrop of the popularization of “inscriptions”. These are Bitcoin NFTs that have recently appeared on Avalanche and TON. In both cases, the launch of the corresponding standard caused an increase in the number of transactions, and in the latter, a malfunction.
This version was confirmed by the Arbitrum project team. They said that the glitch had been fixed and gas prices would soon return to normal.
The Incrypted community noted that the failure occurred due to technical reasons. In networks with a mempool, for example, Avalanche or Polygon, an increase in the number of “inscriptions” leads to an increase in commission, while in this case, due to a stable gas fee, it led to a failure in the operation of the sequencer.
At the time of writing, the official website indicates that Arbitrum One is working stably and this was the only failure in the last 90 days.