Blast Blockchain Locks Up Amid Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade

Blast, the recently launched layer-2 blockchain, froze up 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.”

The last block was produced at 2:05pm UTC, correlating with the time the Dencun upgrade took place, according the the Blast block explorer.

Competitor layer-2 network Arbitrum announced that it will take 24-hours to integrate elements of the Dencun upgrade, which will ultimately prompt a reduction in 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.

At 3:09 UTC, Blast announced that the mainnet was back online roughly an hour after the previous block was produced.

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

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

UPDATE (March 13, 2024, 15:32 UTC): Adds sentence on Blast coming back online.