Avalanche responds to network problems: network traffic overload

Original source: Avalanche AVAX official account

On February 12, the decentralized network Avalanche officially stated that it had discovered a cross-chain function error. During the launch of the decentralized exchange Pangolin, the C chain (smart contract platform) node was triggered after the load was too high. After the trigger, a bad block was generated on the C chain, causing the entire network to panic.

Subsequently, Avalanche issued a short explanation about the problem and responded to the community's questions. The following is Avalanche's response:

The following is About what happened after the DEX "Pangolin" (Pangolin) went online:

The huge load triggered a bug with a very low probability, which caused a bug in the network a problem state. This goes undetected in testing because even the best testing tools can't simulate the scenario of thousands of users trying to use every feature.

More details:

There is a bug in the code that wraps the EVM, it As a result, a bad block was generated on the C chain when exporting from the X chain to the C chain. This vulnerability only exists in the import of the X chain to the C chain, everything else is not affected. The probability of encountering import problems is very low, but because of the extremely high traffic influx into the C chain at that time, the vulnerability was triggered. This vulnerability caused an increase in the overall network load, however, because Avalanche placed more emphasis on the security of the system, and thus, the network was automatically locked down and attempted to repair itself. Similar vulnerabilities have occurred on chains such as Bitcoin and Zcash.

This bug mainly affects the P chain and the C chain, and the X chain is the DAG. Although the X chain is still running, the network is busy constantly repairing the problem , thus greatly reducing the operating efficiency of the X chain.

You may ask some questions:

Q: Is this an underlying protocol problem?

Answer: Absolutely not! This is actually a loophole in the validity checking process, just like Bitcoin and Zcash minted coins in the past The same validity check loopholes encountered when

Q: Does this mean that Avalanche cannot scale?

A: This has nothing to do with the Avalanche protocol, Avalanche works perfectly fine. However, the code connecting Avalanche to the EVM did not work as expected and even produced problematic states for the correct nodes, causing node congestion on the network.

Q: Is the fund safe?

Answer: Fund It's all safe. This is what Avalanche ensures.

Q: Does this mean that the avalanche is concentrated?

< p>A: Actually the opposite! No party in an avalanche can unilaterally change the state of the network. If Avalanche is centralized, this problem can be fixed immediately by restarting the state and invalidating bad blocks. On the contrary, because no one party can control it, the completion of the patch requires a network-wide coordinated network upgrade. This is an important feature of a decentralized system, which places more emphasis on security.

Q: What does this mean for avalanches? Will this happen again?

Answer: Although it is not a good thing to encounter such a bug, this stressful event will make Avalanche stronger and more stable. Other bugs may also be found, however, the more Avalanche is subjected to high loads in a real production environment, the better its long-term stability will be. As such, we don't want to run into more bugs that keep us up at night, but encountering these kinds of exceptions also contributes to making our network stronger. The more stress tests Avalanche undergoes, the more indestructible he will become.

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