Helium network team resolves consensus error after 4-hour outage

The Internet of Things (IoT) blockchain Helium shut down for about four hours on July 11 due to a validator outage due to a software update, delaying transaction finality.

During the outage, devices that transfer data over the network were unaffected, but minor rewards and token transfers remained pending. The team solved the problem by skipping the blockchain one block ahead and resuming normal functionality.

At 10:20 EST, the consensus group stopped generating blocks at a block height of 1435692 on the helium (HNT) blockchain. according to To update the status. Due to lack of network consensus, the token transfer could not be completed and no new block was created.

We are back. The chain processed blocks 1,435,693. We keep monitoring the chain all day long.

Helium (@helium) July 11, 2022

Helium is an IoT network that uses physical wireless hotspots to allow users to connect to their devices from anywhere within the wireless range. In a helium network, a consensus group consists of 43 validator nodes randomly selected at regular intervals to provide network consensus.

In Afterlife Due to this event, helium engineers cited two reasons why validators stopped creating consensus on the network.

First, a problem with the validator’s July 8th software update was the cause of the problem. The v1.12.3 update was designed to provide support for 5G mobile subnetworks and their MOBILE tokens.

Another cause was the “local network outage”. On the project’s Discord channel, the helium moderator “Digerati” has a technical problem running on the same Amazon Web Services (AWS) network with a high concentration validator randomly selected as a consensus group at outage. I explained that I did.

AWS is a global cloud computing and data storage service that you can use to enhance your computer network, such as helium.

Exacerbating the problem was the failure of the auto-skip feature, which was supposed to automatically select a new consensus group. “Due to a known issue, the auto-skip feature didn’t work as expected,” the team said. However, it is not clear what the “known problem” the team mentioned is.

The network could not select another consensus group, but according to the 10:56 am ET, it was designed with the ability to skip the blockchain one block ahead “to mitigate this situation”. .. publication From the team.

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By 1:45 pm (Eastern Time), the creation of the new block started with block number 1435693. The team worked closely with the validator operator to ensure that it was properly synchronized and released a new software update.

HNT has fallen 4.1% in the last 24 hours and is trading at $ 8.76 according to To Coin Gecko. It has fallen 84% from its all-time high in November 2021.