Why has the once "star public chain" Avalanche become so desolate, with two outages before the upgrade going unnoticed?

Author: Grapefruit, ChainCatcher

Within three days, the Avalanche chain experienced two instances of halting block production for over 60 minutes. The Cortina upgrade originally scheduled for March 30 has been postponed to April 6 due to network instability issues.

As is well known, Avalanche's network core consists of three main parts to enhance processing speed and scalability: the X-Chain (primarily responsible for asset creation and transaction processing); the P-Chain (mainly used for node staking and network validation); and the C-Chain (primarily used for the deployment and interaction of smart contracts).

The two outages mainly occurred on the C-Chain. According to post-event analysis data from official engineers, the primary reason for these outages was an error during the preparation for the Cortina upgrade, which required multiple upgrades of the AvalancheGo node software version to fix. This led to some node operators failing to update their software to the latest version in a timely manner, resulting in network instability.

Moreover, the Cortina upgrade is of great significance to Avalanche users, as it will change the original consensus mechanism of the X-Chain to adopt the same Snowman consensus as the X-Chain and C-Chain; thus, full-chain interoperability within the Avalanche ecosystem will be achieved.

The outages before the two upgrades raised questions in the community about the stability of the Avalanche network, but compared to product and technology updates, the stagnation of ecological development on the Avalanche chain is more concerning.

The fact that two consecutive outages went largely unnoticed stands in stark contrast to Solana, where every outage becomes a focal point. Why has the once highly regarded "star public chain" become so desolate?

What Caused the Two Outages on the Avalanche C Chain?

On March 23, the Avalanche C-Chain halted block production for 134 minutes at block height 27788298 before resuming normal operations.

Subsequently, Avalanche co-founder Kevin Sekniqi responded on Twitter, stating that the issue was due to the release of the new version v.1.9.14 of AvalancheGo nodes, and validators needed to update their nodes to the latest version to ensure network stability. However, on the same day that Avalanche C resumed block production, some nodes on the Avalanche X-Chain remained offline, processing only a few transactions per hour, leading to severe transaction backlogs and rendering the chain nearly unusable.

Avalanche C Chain Outage, X Chain Network Instability

Embarrassingly, on March 26, the Avalanche C experienced another halt in block production at block height 27925928, resuming after 82 minutes.

Avalanche C Chain 2 Outage Table

Within three days, Avalanche experienced two instances of halting block production. However, these two outage events did not attract much attention from users, and the price of AVAX showed little reaction. Nonetheless, some community users are concerned that Avalanche might lose on-chain ecological projects due to this network instability and whether it will repeat Solana's frequent outages.

On March 29, Avalanche engineer Stephen Buttolph stated in a blog that the two brief instabilities of the Avalanche main network were due to an erroneous reconstruction of the X-Chain while preparing for the Cortina upgrade, requiring continuous upgrades of the AvalancheGo version to fix the issue, initially changing from v1.9.14 to v1.9.15, but finding it misaligned, and ultimately upgrading to v1.9.16. During this period, the stability of block production on the P-Chain and C-Chain was affected.

He further explained that the outage on March 23 was due to a large number of validators not having updated to the latest available version of AvalancheGo, causing nodes to operate under different execution rules; the halt on March 26 was due to inconsistent states among a large number of validators, preventing unified validation. However, whenever more validators updated to the latest available version of AvalancheGo, the Avalanche network regained stability.

Additionally, he noted that due to the instability of the Avalanche network, extra testing would be added to the X-Chain, and the planned activation timeline for the Cortina upgrade on the Fuji testnet would be delayed by one week.

From this perspective, the instability on the Avalanche chain is due to the Cortina upgrade. What exactly is the Avalanche Cortina upgrade? What parts have been updated?

In fact, on March 24, Avalanche officially announced matters related to the Cortina upgrade, originally scheduled to release the pre-release code for the Avalanche Cortina upgrade on the Fuji testnet on March 27, with activation set for March 30 at 23:00. Currently, the Cortina upgrade timeline has been updated, with the Fuji activation code to be released on April 3, and the Cortina upgrade to be activated on Fuji on April 6.

The Cortina upgrade mainly includes three parts: changing the X-Chain consensus to Snowman consensus (Snowman++) to linearize it; introducing batch delegator rewards; and increasing the gas limit on the C-Chain.

X Chain Running Snowman Consensus (Snowman++) Linearization------In the Avalanche public chain, the X-Chain uses Avalanche consensus based on DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), allowing multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously without ordering; however, the P-Chain and C-Chain, as well as subnets, use Snowman++ consensus, which arranges transactions in a linear manner.

In January of this year, Avalanche introduced the Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM) communication protocol for subnets, allowing data and encrypted assets to be shared between subnets.

However, due to the different consensus mechanisms, the X-Chain cannot integrate with AWM and cannot communicate with subnet information. This Cortina upgrade will change the X-Chain consensus to Snowman consensus, effectively connecting the entire Avalanche chain.

Introducing Batch Delegator Rewards------Since the launch of the Avalanche network, validators have charged service fees to node delegators, with the P-Chain distributing these fees as separate UTXOs to validators during each delegation period. With a significant increase in the number of delegators on the network over the past few months, reaching 80,000 by March 20, the number of UTXOs that validators could receive as fees has also increased significantly. This means that validators will ultimately receive thousands of small UTXOs, which must be aggregated for any use.

Cortina modified the distribution method of these delegation fees to process them in batches. After the activation of Cortina, all validators who start staking will have their delegation fees concentrated and distributed when the nodes are undelegated.

Increasing the C Chain Gas Limit------The gas limit for C-Chain blocks has increased from 8M to 15M. The block gas limit not only restricts the gas price during a certain time period but also limits the complexity of transactions that can be published in a single block.

Increasing the gas limit not only adjusts the consumption of gas fees but also facilitates developers in deploying more complex dApps.

In summary, the Avalanche Cortina upgrade not only optimizes the X-Chain, achieving full-chain information interoperability within the Avalanche ecosystem, but also the increase in gas limits provides convenience for developers to build complex applications and transactions.

Additionally, it is important to note that before successfully completing the Cortina upgrade on the Fuji testnet, the official will announce the activation time for the Avalanche mainnet and release the latest official version of AvalancheGo v1.10.0. At that time, node operators will also need to update AvalancheGo to the latest version; otherwise, it will affect staking rewards.

Stagnation of Ecological Development and Serious Loss of Applications on the Avalanche Chain

Compared to changes in underlying product technology, users are more sensitive to changes in on-chain ecological data.

In fact, the two outages on Avalanche did not attract much attention in the crypto market. So much so that when the Avalanche C first halted block production on March 23, Conflux co-founder Fan Long tweeted his confusion about the community accepting blockchain network interruptions as the norm. "It seems no one reported it, and no one cares. Are we only focused on token prices now?"

After the second outage, some users posted on social media asking why no one was discussing the fact that Avalanche had stopped operating twice in less than three days due to errors in the new software version. If this had happened on Solana, many projects would have fled. Would anyone leave Avalanche due to network instability?

However, these phenomena also indirectly reflect the low user activity on the Avalanche chain.

According to DefiLlama data, on April 3, the number of active addresses in 24 hours was 25,239, and the total value locked (TVL) in crypto assets on the Avalanche chain was only $836 million, maintaining this level for nearly half a year since November 2022. Compared to the peak of over $10 billion in 2022, the market value has shrunk to one-tenth of its highest point. The daily active user count on the Avalanche C chain has remained around 30,000 since November last year, while during the chain's explosive growth period last year, the number of daily active accounts could reach 141,583.

Avalanche Chain Ecosystem

From on-chain data, it can be seen that the ecological development on the Avalanche chain has entered a stagnation period. Additionally, the decrease in user activity on-chain has led to the departure of native ecological applications seeking new growth points and opportunities. Recently, platforms like GMX and Trader Joe, which were initially sourced from the Avalanche chain, have made a splash on Arbitrum, with Trader Joe's TVL on Arbitrum recently increasing to $28.9 million, nearly matching the $29.89 million TVL on the Avalanche chain.

In addition to the loss of ecological applications, Avalanche faces increasing competition, not only from similar products like BSC, Solana, Polygon, and Fantom that emerged around the same time, but also from new public chains focused on high performance like Aptos and Sui, as well as Layer 2 public chains like Arbitrum and Optimism that are currently gaining popularity.

Emin Gün Sirer, founder of Avalanche developer Ava Labs, stated in an interview on March 25 that many L1 blockchains have emerged in the crypto ecosystem in recent years, and within the next three to five years, a large number of L1 blockchains will be "eliminated." He believes that there are already too many L1s that are essentially copying others' scripts, bringing things to the market that are not needed. The report did not mention the recent outages on Avalanche.

How can Avalanche avoid being eliminated by the market and maintain a long-term position among these public chains? The development of public chains today is no longer just a competition of technology; it also requires comparing the prosperity of on-chain ecosystems and whether project teams can create their own unique features. For example, during the same period, Polygon has evolved from a sidechain to a ZK scaling solution aggregator, becoming the preferred partner for traditional companies like Starbucks and Disney to issue NFTs.

From Avalanche's public actions, it is already exploring new use cases beyond DeFi and other application ecosystems, including NFTs and collaborations with traditional enterprises.

On March 30, the Avalanche Foundation launched the NFT initiative Avaissance, aimed at promoting the development of the Avalanche NFT ecosystem through dedicated guidance, financial support, and DAO organizational management. Additionally, in January of this year, the e-commerce platform Shopify supported merchants on its platform to directly sell and mint NFTs on the Avalanche chain, and the esports platform TSM collaborated with Avalanche to unlock Web3 experiences for players, among other initiatives.

However, based on on-chain data and market user reactions, these actions have not yet yielded immediate effects for Avalanche. In response to this phenomenon, some users have expressed that Avalanche has its own development pace, its on-chain ecological development is already relatively complete, and development is ongoing, just not as prominent as new public chains like Aptos and Layer 2. Compared to these new public chains, Avalanche, as an established public chain, has undergone a long period of security testing, and once the hype subsides, developers will still return to deploy.