The TON blockchain went down twice inside 36 hours because of an surprising spike in transaction volumes pushed by the sudden recognition of a brand new memecoin known as DOGS. The heavy visitors brought on by DOGS transactions overwhelmed the community, resulting in considerations in regards to the blockchain’s capability to deal with excessive volumes of exercise and its general stability.
The TON blockchain just lately confronted two important outages, each linked to the sudden launch and recognition of the DOGS memecoin. The primary disruption occurred on 27 August 2024, when block manufacturing halted at 23:00 UTC and didn’t resume till 05:30 UTC on 28 August, resulting in a six-hour downtime. The second disruption started on 28 August 2024 at 19:19 UTC, lasting over 4 hours.
Each outages had been triggered by the overwhelming demand generated by the DOGS token, which led to an enormous improve in transaction quantity on the community. In simply 48 hours, TON processed a staggering 20 million transactions, overwhelming the system to the purpose of breaking the blockchain. The DOGS memecoin, impressed by Telegram’s mascot Spotty, launched a big airdrop that triggered congestion, and the heavy load from the token minting additional strained the community throughout the second disruption.
A number of validators had been unable to wash the database of previous transactions, which suggests they struggled to take away outdated transaction knowledge successfully. The lack to wash up the database led to a lack of consensus amongst validators, as they couldn’t course of new transactions appropriately or keep synchronized data of the blockchain’s state.
The underlying difficulty with the Toncoin community, resembling many blockchain networks, pertains to scalability challenges, significantly with sharding. When a blockchain community makes use of sharding to scale, it splits the community into smaller elements known as “shards.” Every shard handles a portion of the general transactions, which helps the community course of extra transactions directly.
Nevertheless, shards want to speak with one another to remain in sync. For instance, if one shard processes a transaction that impacts knowledge in one other shard, the 2 shards should change messages to replace their data accordingly. The messages make sure that all shards have the right and up-to-date data.
When there isn’t a lot exercise on the community, the communication works high-quality. Nevertheless, throughout excessive visitors, when many transactions are taking place concurrently, the variety of messages exchanged between shards will increase dramatically. Processing all of the messages turns into overwhelming for the community, resulting in delays, slowdowns, and even failures in maintaining the shards synchronized. In consequence, the system is unsustainable, because the community can’t deal with the amount of communication required to maintain every thing operating easily.
The idea of execution isolation presents a extra environment friendly resolution to the issue. As a substitute of regularly speaking between completely different elements of the community (shards), execution isolation permits every half to deal with its personal transactions independently. This reduces the necessity for fixed back-and-forth communication, which might sluggish issues down when there’s a variety of exercise.
Appchains, also called application-specific blockchains, take this concept even additional. They’re specialised blockchains designed for particular duties or purposes. By specializing in only one sort of exercise, appchains can handle visitors extra successfully and keep away from the problems that come from attempting to do every thing directly on a single community. Examples of appchains embrace Polkadot Parachains, Cosmos Zones, Close to Protocol Sharded Chains, Polygon Supernets, and Avalanche Subnets.
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