Canto blames ‘secondary effects’ as chain halts again 90 mins after restart

Layer-1 blockchain Canto appears to have halted block production again after briefly coming back online, with the team flagging “unforeseen secondary effects” as a fresh problem. 

According to Canto Explorer, the Cosmos-based layer-1 blockchain began block production again at about 12:35 pm UTC on Aug. 12 after applying its scheduled fix, running for about 90 minutes before halting again on block 10,848,199.

Canto had initially pegged an “upgrade” at 12:00 pm UTC on Aug. 12 to address the consensus issue. A consensus mechanism validates a transaction and marks it as authentic, listing it on the blockchain.

“Due to unforeseen secondary effects caused by the proposer priority issue, validators have halted the network after upgrading to v8,” said Canto in a post at around 9:30 pm UTC on Aug .12.

It noted that its core development team, B-Harvest, is now building and testing a new version, v8.1.0, and expects validators to be able to resume producing blocks in about 15 hours from the time of the X post.

Validators play a vital role in the functioning of the blockchain, adding new blocks and verifying transactions in proposed blocks.

“Once again, all funds are safe. Once the chain resumes, users will be able to access all activities as usual,” Canto said.

Cointelegraph contacted Canto for further comment and clarification about what caused the second outage. 

Token price surges despite outage

Despite the blockchain being down for the second time this week, Canto’s token price has surged over the last day.

CoinMarketCap shows the token price is currently $0.07, up 80% over the last 24 hours.

The token is still around 91% away from its all-time high of $0.7236, which it reached on Aug. 2, 2023.

Launched in August 2022, Canto styles itself as a permissionless general-purpose blockchain designed for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that is also Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible.

The Canto blockchain announced a plan to migrate to the Ethereum Network in September 2023 and become a layer-2 network. However, that decision was reversed in March 2024, and it has remained a layer-1 blockchain ever since.