The decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol dYdX announced that it is investigating a recent halt in block production due to a planned upgrade in the ecosystem. dYdX released a status report on April 8 at 8:30 AM, stating that the ecosystem was undergoing a planned protocol upgrade and that the functions of the dYdX Chain could be interrupted.
Block Production Halts in dYdX Ecosystem
Although the upgrade was successfully completed, the ecosystem did not resume block production following the planned maintenance. At the time of writing, the blockchain explorer platform Nodes Guru indicates that the most recent blocks produced by the dYdX mainnet date back to five hours before the scheduled upgrade.
dYdX team also confirmed that the chain encountered an issue and stated at 9:50 AM that their team was already debugging the problem. However, they mentioned that the issue is still under investigation and may not be resolved until later, and they provided the following statement:
“The issue continues to be investigated. It was decided to reconvene with validators around 6:00 PM. This means that developers will not propose any interim solution or fix by that time, and thus validators will not be involved in any process if they are not online when the chain restarts.”
Notable Steps from the dYdX Team
The protocol upgrade was proposed on February 21 and included advancements such as order book features, risk and security improvements, and developments related to Cosmos. This interruption followed the community’s approval to stake 20 million DYDX tokens on dYdX.
On April 6, the dYdX community voted to allow the staking of $61 million worth of treasury tokens in a liquid staking protocol called Stride. dYdX highlighted that this move followed the growth in trading activities within the protocol and stated:
“The rate of DYDX staked to validators has plateaued, and the exchange’s inflow of funds is increasing at a tremendous rate.”
The dYdX Chain was also the target of a focused attack in November 2023, resulting in a loss of $9 million. On January 3, the protocol announced that it had identified the attacker and was considering legal action. Additionally, the team mentioned that they have improved monitoring and alerts on the platform by upgrading the trade platform.
