For a few hours on Wednesday Asian time, the Zcash blockchain didn’t appear to be producing new blocks – but that’s a problem with the block explorers themselves, not the chain, according to some observers.
Think of the blockchain as a ledger that continually grows as new transactions are added. Each “block” is a new entry in the ledger. So when the network stops creating new blocks, no new transactions can be confirmed. It’s as if the entire payment system was frozen for several hours.
According to several Zcash block explorers, the most recent block was numbered 3,364,601, created at 5:27 UTC on June 3. After that, no new blocks appeared for more than four hours. Normally, Zcash adds a new block approximately every 75 seconds (a little over a minute).
However, the Zcash blockchain was not down. The problem was that some block explorers had not updated their nodes after the recent network upgrade.
“A coordinated upgrade of the Zcash network was activated at block 3364600. Many block explorers had not yet updated their nodes at the time of the upgrade, resulting in a loss of visibility into the state of the chain,” ZODL CEO Josh Swihart told CoinDesk.
“In simpler terms, a network upgrade is a ‘hard fork’ of the chain. Miners started producing blocks on the new chain, leaving the old one behind, but many popular block explorers were still monitoring the old one,” Swihart added.
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius, an infrastructure provider to Solana, also echoed Swihart’s explanation behind the incident.
He said this was an issue because some block explorers were not updating their nodes since the network upgrade this week and that they were currently working on the updates.
Zcash’s native token, ZEC, has surged 8% over the past week, according to CoinDesk data, countering broader market weakness. The token gained 46% last month.
For crypto investors, this event serves as a reminder that even well-known networks can experience technical issues.
UPDATE (June 3, 6:17 p.m. UTC): Adds comments from Josh Swihart.
UPDATE (June 3, 11:00 UTC 🙂 Updates the title and text to indicate that the problem may be with block explorers.
