Bitcoin L2 Stacks faces 5 hour outage halting transactions

Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.

Stacks, a layer-2 blockchain built on Bitcoin, has faced a significant outage lasting over four hours.

According to its status page, the network ceased producing transaction blocks at 7:15 UTC on Jan. 6. Since then, no new blocks have been created, effectively halting transaction processing.

The project’s team confirmed the issue on its social media platform, stating that developers are investigating a delay in block production caused by a signer. While updates are expected, the team has yet to provide a resolution timeline.

They stated:

“Core devs are investigating a delay in block production related to a Signer. Standby for more updates.”

This outage occurs less than three months after the Nakamoto upgrade, a significant update designed to improve transaction speeds and enhance security.

The Nakamoto upgrade closely aligns Stacks blocks with Bitcoin’s finality, leveraging the top crypto’s robust hash power to secure transactions. By tying Stacks to Bitcoin’s blockchain, the network benefits from BTC’s resistance to reorganization, which increases its overall reliability.

The team stated:

“Any transaction you make on Stacks is now secured by 100% of Bitcoin’s hash power.”

Despite the outage, the network’s Stacks (STX) token remains unaffected. Data from CryptoSlate shows STX has gained over 4% in the past 24 hours, reaching $1.71. This continues a week-long rally of 15%, although the token has seen broader declines of over 33% during the past month.

sBTC milestone

Meanwhile, this outage coincides with Stacks’ progress in its sBTC initiative, a Bitcoin-wrapper token.

On Jan. 5, the project stated that the total supply of sBTC reached 1,000 tokens, equivalent to nearly $99 million. This achievement emphasizes the growing adoption of Stacks in DeFi.

It added:

“After the first cap of 1,000 sBTC has been reached, the BTC is now slowly trickling down into the Decentralized Finance applications on Stacks. Efforts are underway to scale this momentum exponentially in the coming weeks and months.”