Polygon zkEVM In “Unscheduled Maintenance” Model, Will This Impact Price?

Current data from in-house Explorer has it that Polygon zkEVM is experiencing an outage that has rendered it inactive for more than 12 hours on Saturday. 

Polygon zkEVM the New Protocol Battling Outage

Polygon zkEVM, which is natively compatible with ERC-20-based applications, was launched almost a year ago on March 27, 2023. It offers a scalability solution for decentralized applications (DApps) that run on the Ethereum blockchain. In the space of this one year, Polygon zkEVM has not been able to gain the kind of attention other Layer-2 similar to it has received within the same period.

Per data reference, the protocol has seen fewer transactions than many of its competitors in the past.

As showcased, the Layer-2 blockchain was unable to successfully sequence or add extra blocks during the ongoing outage. Data from multiple block explorers suggest that the last time a bock was added to the chain was more than 12 hours ago. The team behind the Polygon zkEVM is yet to offer any explanation to the sudden outage. 

However, there is a message on the zkEVM section of Polygonscan that reads; 

“The zkEVM mainnet network is currently on-going unscheduled maintenance, block data might not be up to date.”

Core Reasons for Multiple Outages Remain Unknown

It is not yet certain if the explanation of an “on-going unscheduled maintenance” is the actual reason for the outage. 

Notably, the crypto industry has really been susceptible to outages in recent weeks with Coinbase and Solana at the center of it. A recent outage in the Coinbase ecosystem ended up leaching about $100 billion in market value from the broader crypto capitalization.

There was a recurrence shortly after the price of Bitcoin soared to its ATH. Within 24 hours, data from Downdetector showed that there had been a bulk of problem reports submitted detailing the Coinbase outage. 

Crypto commentator MartyParty believed that the outage was a result of the inferior tooling and technologies that the firm adopted. To allay user’s fears, Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO clarified that the firm is planning to invest in better infrastructure to accommodate its massive demand.

Similarly, Solana was also a victim of multiple outages, and one of them which happened in February rendered the platform dysfunctional for about 5 hours. Market commentators believe these outages are growing and need to be curtailed before they eventually end up causing irreversible damage to the crypto ecosystem. 

Its effect on prices of the underlying crypto may equally be negatively impacted. At the time of this writing, Polygon MATIC was trading at $0.9926 with a 3.22% increase in the last 24 hours, suggesting that the news of the outage has not taken the predicted toll on price.