TON fails DOGS airdrop stress test, causes 3-hour outage

The Open Network (TON) failed to generate any blocks for nearly 3 hours leading its native token to fall by around 5%. Tonscan data shows that the latest block was generated at 06:11:46 UTC+8. The network hiccup has disrupted stability, causing transaction delays, and might even pose security risks.

A recent airdrop of the DOGS meme coin sent transaction volumes skyrocketing. The TON blockchain simply couldn’t keep up, with its transactions per second (TPS) falling short of expectations. This comes in when Toncoin is already dealing with high selling pressure with a 20% price drop recorded in 7 days. 

Bybit suspends services for Toncoin

As reported by Wu Blockchain, Bybit announced that the exchange suspended all deposits and withdrawals through the Toncoin (TON) network due to network instability. TON blockchain failed the stress test as infrastructure crashes in DOGS airdrop.

Justin, a member of the TON Foundation, said that “the network overload dud to DOGS txs overload”. This suggests that the congestion was caused by excessive DOGS token transactions and led to slower processing times, higher fees, and instability. He mentioned that the garbage collection overloaded many of the validators for enough time for them to lose consensus. However, in order to restore consensus validators will be called upon to restart at 4:00 UTC on/around the same time with specific flags.

@cburniske
+ Network overload dud to $DOGS txs overload
+ Garbage collection overloaded many of validators for enough time for them to lose consensus
+ To restore consensus validators will be called upon to restart at 4:00 UTC on/around same time with specific flags

— Justin (@maverickqe) August 28, 2024

Toncoin price took a straight drop from $5.47 to $5.15 level as the network failed to produce blocks. TON has been on a decline for the past months. TON has shed more than 20% of its market value after the crucial arrest of Telegram co-founder CEO Pavel Durov in Paris. He was arrested at Le Bourget Airport as part of a warrant issued by OFIM.

TON’s 24-hour trading volume is down by 30% to stand at $701 million. Toncoin is trading at an average price of $5.32, at the press time. It is still the 10th biggest crypto with a market cap of $13.48 billion.

DOGS airdrop behind the discrepancy

Binance on August 26, 2024, reported that its TON upgrade took longer than expected due to unforeseen issues. It assured that the platform is working to restore normal service as quickly as possible.

TON has highlighted that since the DOGS community launched the on-chain claiming process, the processing speed of requests has reached 150,000 times per minute. The network will be subjected to stress testing with up to 10 million users trading simultaneously. 

With all this chaos, the Telegram Wallet stated that the release of DOGS has caused crypto exchanges and some Wallet functions to not work, and the Wallet’s exchange function is currently unavailable.