on the crypto
In a post on Sunday Medium, blockchain engineer Patrick O'Grady of the Ava Labs team wrote that the increased congestion on the Avalanche network triggered a "nondeterministic bug" related to how the proof-of-blockchain. stake and high-throughput tracks transactions. Funds have never been at risk, O'Grady notes, although the significant misstep has left a valuable lesson for the blockchain industry.
What is Avalanche
Avalanche is a blockchain launched in September 2020 with a promise to process 4.500 transactions per second. It is backed by major cryptocurrency firms including Galaxy Digital, Bitmain and Mike Novogratz's Initialized Capital.
It also has academic approval, having been designed by Emin Gün Sirer, a professor of computer science at Cornell University. The blockchain is usually associated with other so-called "Ethereum killers", or blockchains designed to solve the scalability problems that have plagued the second largest blockchain since its inception.
Although born to steal market share from Ethereum, Avalanche has also been touted as a way to complement and connect, rather than strictly compete, with its predecessor. Avalanche has three "default chains", including the so-called "contract chain" that supports the Ethereum virtual machine (here the quotation in real time) and its Solidity coding language. And this is where the problem arose.
The bug
In short, in order to increase transaction throughput, the three Avalanche chains remain separate and distinct from each other, each operating within a series of transaction types, until such time as a resource it has to switch to another chain.
That process was put to the test following the launch of a new decentralized money market called Pangolin. An atypical amount of users and volume created an equally atypical amount of blocks to process.
This, O'Grady notes, triggered a bug that created false cross-chain “minting”. As O'Grady said: "This caused some validators to accept some invalid coin transactions, while the rest of the network refused to process these transactions and blocked the contract chain." Importantly, double charges did not occur and the bug did not affect regular network activities, O'Grady wrote.
Problem solved
Although the bug was taken care of within a few hours, finding a solution was not that simple. Eventually, the developers solved the problem by incrementally deploying a patch, basically the way any software is updated.
Blockchains are complex infrastructures, built by human beings, but managed by machines. A problem small enough to go unnoticed during an initial analysis can multiply as a network grows.
In the case of Avalanche, the bug didn't cause the network outage, but it was still a cold shower for those who boasted the network's ability to handle high throughput before launch. AVAX, the blockchain token, is trading at around $ 41,20, down from $ 53 on February 11 when the problem occurred.
