An Ava Labs engineer gave a rundown of the small code bug that severely crippled the Avalanche blockchain last week.
In a Sunday Medium post, blockchain engineer Patrick O’Grady wrote that increased congestion on the network triggered a “non-deterministic bug” related to how the high-throughput, proof-of-stake blockchain keeps track of transactions.
Funds were never at risk, O’Grady notes, though the high-profile misstep has a valuable lesson for the blockchain industry.
Avalanche launched in September 2020 with the claim it could process 4,500 transactions per second. It’s backed by prominent cryptocurrency firms including Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, Bitmain and Initialized Capital. It also has an academic stamp of approval, having been designed by Emin Gün Sirer, a computer science professor at Cornell University.
The blockchain is usually grouped with other so-called “Ethereum killers,” or blockchains designed to solve the scalability problems that have plagued the second-largest blockchain since inception. While positioned to
