What Happened During the Degen L3 Outage and Reorganization?
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What Happened During the Degen L3 Outage and Reorganization?
Degen Chain halted block production for over 24 hours.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Proof of Track
Translation: Peng Sun, Foresight News
At 04:15:29 Beijing time on May 13, the L3 chain Degen Chain experienced an outage, halting block production for over 24 hours. This incident has drawn significant attention from the community.
Degen Chain is an ultra-low-cost L3 launched on March 28 by DAO infrastructure provider Syndicate. Early yesterday morning, rollup service provider Conduit tweeted that after a custom configuration change at 03:00 UTC on April 11, Degen stopped publishing batches. According to Syndicate co-founder Will Papper's post on Warpcast, the affected block number was 15043908, occurring at approximately 17:15:45 Beijing time on May 11. Currently, Degen nodes are resyncing from the genesis block. Based on Conduit’s estimate, this process will be completed around 21:00 Beijing time tonight.
It was precisely this custom configuration change that triggered a reorganization of 500,000 blocks on Degen Chain during the downtime. So what exactly happened to Degen Chain?
First, Degen Chain is an L3 built using Arbitrum Orbit, Base (for settlement), and AnyTrust (for data availability). The gas token on Degen Chain is DEGEN. I fully agree with henry from the penumbra team when he said, "There is no L3, only L1 and L2." To me, Degen Chain is simply an "L2 on top of another L2."
Next, let's discuss the issue of block reorganization on L3s. Why does block reorganization occur on L3s? As noted by L2BEAT researcher donnoh.eth, there are three possible scenarios:
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The batch posted by the sequencer on L2 is inconsistent with soft confirmations;
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The L2 reorganizes due to its own internal issues;
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An L1 reorganization triggers an L2 reorganization.
The first reason is the most common and is also the most likely cause of this reorganization.
Beyond this, we need to consider several other questions, such as:
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Why should we trust that the operator-run sequencer is honest?
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How do we resolve reorganizations when both L2 and L3 are actually decentralized?
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What if RaaS fails?
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What if L1 or L2 fails?
Of course, details about the specific nature of the custom configuration change await Conduit's post-mortem analysis.
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