Polygon’s Consensus Layer Down Briefly, Before Service Restored

The Polygon Heimdall V2 mainnet, the consensus client for the Polygon proof-of-stake chain, went down on Wednesday due to a suspected “consensus bug,” the Polygon team said. The service has been since restored.

Heimdall V2, which handles communication between nodes validators on Polygon, went down about 9:30 UTC and did not impact the Bor layer, used for block production and transaction processing, according to an update from Polygon.

The disruption lasted one hour and was caused by an unidentified validator’s exit from the network, Polygon spokespersons told Cointelegraph. 

Block production on the Bor mainnet was uninterrupted throughout the downtime, and any discrepancies between the network’s actual uptime and block explorers are now being resolved. Polygon spokespeople said:

Following Heimdall’s recovery, we observed sync inconsistencies emerging across several RPC providers’ Bor nodes. We are now actively collaborating with all RPC partners to accelerate resolution and restore full availability. One provider is already back online, with slightly delayed sync.”

Consistent network uptime is critical for blockchain networks that bill themselves as a borderless alternative to traditional finance that is available 24 hours a day, year-round. However, challenges to network uptime have grown due to increasing network complexity.

Related: Polygon’s ‘most complex’ hard fork goes live Thursday

Heimdall V2 upgrade goes live

The Heimdall V2 upgrade was launched in early July, slashing finality times to about five seconds and upgrading the network’s tech stack, which now relies on CometBFT and Cosmos-SDK v0.50.

“This is the most technically complex hard fork Polygon proof-of-stake (PoS) has seen since its launch in 2020,” Polygon co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, said in a July 8 X post.

While reduced block times and higher network throughput continue to be the focus of blockchain networks, the enhanced performance introduces complexity in the system and more breaking points.

Heimdall V1 was also a source of network downtime issues. In March 2022, Polygon experienced several hours of downtime due to an error in the Heimdall layer.

At the time, the Polygon team said the Heimdall V1 issue was the result of a software bug that caused validators to be on different versions of the blockchain.

Magazine: Polygon never set out to beat Ethereum: Anurag Arjun, X Hall of Flame