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Blast Blockchain Locks Up Amid Ethereum's Dencun Upgrade

Its mainnet stopped producing blocks around the time of the Ethereum overhaul.

By Nick Baker, Oliver Knight|Edited by Nikhilesh De

Updated Mar 13, 2024, 4:45 p.m. Published Mar 13, 2024, 2:59 p.m.

Blast stops producing blocks after Dencun (Md Riduwan Molla/Unsplash)

Blast, the recently launched layer-2 blockchain, froze up for about an hour Wednesday amid Ethereum's major Dencun upgrade.

Blast, which is built atop Ethereum and therefore intrinsically linked to it, posted on X that its mainnet "has stopped producing blocks due to issues related to Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade."

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Blocks stopped being produced at 14:05 UTC, correlating with the time the Dencun upgrade took place, according to the Blast block explorer. At 15:09 UTC, Blast announced that the mainnet was back online.

The Blast Mainnet has stopped producing blocks due to issues related to Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade.

Core engineering contributors are working on a fix. We’ll share an update and post-mortem once the fix is live (eta 30-60 min).
— Blast (@Blast_L2) March 13, 2024

Amid the snafu, Blast competitor Arbitrum announced that it will take 24 hours to integrate elements of the Dencun upgrade, which will ultimately prompt a reduction in Ethereum fees.

The Blast mainnet went live on Feb. 29 after attracting $2.3 billion worth of deposits following its announcement in November.

The network's largest protocol, Orbit Finance, experienced a 32% rise in total value locked (TVL) to $431 million over the past 24 hours. The rise couldn't deter a plunge in the value of Orbit's native token, which is down by more than 20% today after being issued on March 8.

CORRECTION (March 13, 2024, 15:01 UTC): Fixes the spelling of Dencun in the headline.

UPDATE (March 13, 2024, 15:14 UTC): Adds context throughout.

UPDATE (March 13, 2024, 15:32 UTC): Adds that Blast is back online.

Ethereum Blast Dencun Outage

Nick Baker

Nick Baker is CoinDesk's deputy editor-in-chief. He won a Loeb Award for editing CoinDesk's coverage of FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, including Ian Allison's scoop that caused SBF's empire to collapse. Before joining in 2022, he worked at Bloomberg News for 16 years as a reporter, editor and manager. Previously, he was a reporter at Dow Jones Newswires, wrote for The Wall Street Journal and earned a journalism degree from Ohio University. He owns more than $1,000 of BTC and SOL.

Oliver Knight

Oliver Knight is the co-leader of CoinDesk data tokens and data team. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022 Oliver spent three years as the chief reporter at Coin Rivet. He first started investing in bitcoin in 2013 and spent a period of his career working at a market making firm in the UK. He does not currently have any crypto holdings.