Canto chain targets fix amid 33-hour outage caused by consensus issue

Cosmos-based layer-1 blockchain Canto says it is planning to implement an upgrade on Aug. 12 to address its ongoing 33-hour outage, which it says was caused by “an issue with consensus.”

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.

According to the CantoScan block explorer, the Canto blockchain has been down for over a day, with the last transaction, block 10847516, occurring at 2:29 am on Aug. 11. 

Etherscan also shows no new transactions on Canto in the last 33 hours and only two transactions in the last 46 hours.

In an Aug. 12 update posted to Canto’s official social media account on X, the team confirmed a problem that has temporarily halted the chain.

Canto claims “an issue with the consensus” is the culprit behind the outage but did not provide any other details, other than an “upgrade to address this issue,” is scheduled for 12:00 pm UTC on Aug. 12.

A consensus mechanism validates a transaction and marks it as authentic, listing it on the blockchain.

Another update, the Callisto upgrade, was locked in for the blockchain on Aug. 9 at 14:30 UTC. Canto has not addressed whether this went through, or if there is a link between the Callisto upgrade and the current outage. 

Despite the ongoing outage, Canto says users shouldn’t be alarmed, and once the consensus problem has been fixed, they expect all usual functions to resume as normal.

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

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.

DefiLlama data shows that activity on the blockchain surged in February 2023, but it has since been sliding down the rankings to become the 80th largest blockchain by total value locked.