On Wednesday, a Redditor reported a collapse in operations on the Stellar (XLM) network when all transactions stopped due to lack of verification. It proved to be a temporary overall switch-off of all nodes run by Stellar Development Foundation (SDF).
Lack of consensus between nodes on Stellar
A representative of SDF confirmed the problem in the Reddit comment thread and said they were doing their best to resolve the issue.
The break in the platform’s work lasted nearly two hours. Allegedly, some participants of the network were unable to come to consensus about blocks, so transactions were suspended until the issue was solved.
This brought up comments regarding a debate about decentralization that was attempted earlier within the network. The Redditor who made the post in the first place commented:
I really hope we’ll get a real debate about decentralization after this event. And about the strategies to achieve this decentralization.”
A recent Medium article discusses the situation with Stellar’s nodes, saying that a while ago Stellar was ‘very centralized’ and adding that the goal now is to make the network more decentralized by adding more nodes. The article also speaks of the issue that actually took place as an example of a possible turn of events.
…an outage of all SDF nodes or a network disruption between SatoshiPay and SDF would have brought our nodes to a halt.”
XLM market stance
When the outage took place, the XLM token faced a wave of volatility but still as Thursday started, it surged by over 22 percent and was the best performing coin among altcoins on the top ten list.
At press time, the token shows an 11.21 percent rise, trading at $0.133.
Alex Dovbnya
Arman Shirinyan
