The zkSync Era network, a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, suffered a major outage today, stopping producing blocks for over an hour.
At the time of writing this article, the network has still not started block production.
According to some information, the network outage was triggered by a similar event with an increase in inscription transactions used to place arbitrary data on the Bitcoin blockchain.
According to some information, the network outage was triggered by an increase in inscription transactions used to place arbitrary data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Inscriptions are a type of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that have gained popularity in the cryptocurrency community in recent months. However, they also pose a cybersecurity risk as they can exploit a vulnerability in Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots, exceeding the data bearer limit and spamming the network with large amounts of non-transactional data.
This can lead to increased network congestion, higher fees, and decreased performance for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency networks with inscriptions such as zkSync Era.
The zkSync Era team has not yet made an official statement regarding the incident, but some users think that the network is unable to process these transactions due to the size and complexity of the inscriptions.
*This is not investment advice.