Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta Faces Comparison with Solana: Mainnet Beta Resumes Operations After 12-Hour Downtime

• Polygon zkEVM suffered downtime that lasted 12 hours, drawing comparisons with Solana, which has encountered its fair share of outages in recent months and causing concern over its ability.
• The team blamed the glitch on a Layer 1 reorganization that affected its sequencer and was able to rectify it hours later, with the promise of a post-mortem report on the issue soon.

Polygon’s scaling solution, the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) mainnet beta, has resumed operations after an outage that lasted over 12 hours.

Users of the zkEVM started reporting challenges with transaction processing yesterday, and hours later, Polygon admitted to the outage on social media. The team revealed that the incident was due to a Layer 1 reorganization that affected its sequencer.

In Layer 2s, sequencers propose batches of transactions to the network, which an aggregator validates.

The Polygon team assured users that other facets of the network were unaffected, stating:

This only impacts Polygon zkEVM (which is the only rollup) and does not impact Polygon PoS, Polygon CDK, or any chain that has deployed using Polygon CDK.

Polygon zkEVM Mainnnet Beta faced an issue with its sequencer due to an L1 reorg. We are working on fully resolving the issue and will follow up with a detailed post-mortem.

This only impacts Polygon zkEVM (which is the only rollup) and does not impact Polygon PoS, Polygon CDK,…

— Polygon | Aggregated (@0xPolygon) March 23, 2024

The outage lasted around 12 hours. As the team later revealed, the Emergency Council for Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta took immediate steps to remedy the situation. This included activating the emergency state to allow the team of core developers to fix the system.

An emergency state removes all the checkpoints put in place to ensure no sudden changes are made to the system. Immediately after the fix, the Council removed the emergency state. Any other proposed update will be subject to a 10-day waiting period before it takes effect, ensuring all community members can scrutinize it.

The Crypto World Blasts Polygon

Following the outage, several leaders in the crypto community chastised Polygon, drawing parallels to Solana, which, despite becoming one of the largest ecosystems in the space, has struggled to shake off its outage links.

He stated:

It has become really easy to launch a trash L2, and it’s fairly easy to do that trick, perfected by a certain chain that reorgs every other day, where you find someone who is actually doing real work, and you parrot what they say, while angling for a photo op with Vitalik. So, we need to be extra vigilant about the red flags that characterize trash L2s.

Sirer called on the crypto community to shun all Layer 2s whose narrative fails to match with the technology, such as centralized sequencers, an attack on Polygon that just fell short of mentioning the project.

Another red flag, according to the Avalanche founder, is any project that sells tokens to raise money to fund future technology development. This, he believes, makes the project a security offering according to the Howey Test.

He concluded: