Binance Temporarily Suspends Polygon Transactions Citing an Unidentified Network Issue

Scalability platform Polygon appears to be dealing with a network-wide issue causing a transaction blockage as a result of which popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance has taken the step of temporarily stopp all withdrawals from the platform. According to the announcement on the official Binance website, deposits and withdrawals for the Polygon network have been suspended for the time being although a formal reason hasn't been cited yet. In the meantime, the exchange claims to be working with the Polygon network team in a bid to resolve the situation.

In a subsequent tweet, the Polygon team has responded stating that the "network is stable, and working fine" while adding that "Binance is upgrading its nodes, and currently syncing the block data, hence they have paused the deposit and withdrawal." The network issue appears to have occurred days after another Polygon network outage on March 11 which followed shortly after a network upgrade.

Following the outage on March 11, the project's team confirmed the issue and worked on identifying the "definitive" cause, which reportedly originated from an even earlier upgrade. In addition to it, the team revealed that there may have been a bug in the upgrade itself that caused a split between validators.

It is worth noting that the Polygon network is made up of three layers, each performing a distinct function. The Ethereum layer runs smart contracts while the Bor layer aids in generating blocks. The fault lies in the third Heimdall layer.

The suspected bug caused different Heimdall validators to be on different versions of the chain, thereby not reaching a complete consensus to greenlight transactions. While the outage was expected to last for a few hours and was also notified by the Polygon team, the 11-hour extended outage became a reason for concern for many projects as well as traders.