For a few hours on Wednesday Asian time, Zcash’s blockchain appeared to produce no 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 keeps growing as new transactions are added. Each “block” is a new entry in the ledger. So when the network stops making new blocks, no new transactions can be confirmed. This corresponds to the entire payment system freezing for several hours.
According to several Zcash block explorers, the latest block number was 3,364,601, created at 5:27 UTC on June 3rd. After that, no new blocks appeared for over four hours. Normally, Zcash adds a new block about every 75 seconds (just over a minute).
However, the Zcash blockchain was not down. The problem was that some of the block explorers did not update their nodes after the latest network upgrade.
“A coordinated Zcash network upgrade 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,” CEO of ZODL 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 looking at 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 is a problem with some block explorers not updating their nodes since the network upgrade this week and that they are working on updates now.
Zcash’s native token ZEC is up 8% over the past week, according to CoinDesk data, bucking broader market weakness. The token has risen 46% in the last month.
For crypto investors, this event is a reminder that even well-known networks can run into technical problems.
UPDATE (June 3, 18:17 UTC): Adding comments from Josh Swihart.
UPDATE (June 3 at 11:00 UTC:) Updating title and text to say the problem may have been with the block explorers.
