Less than two weeks after the Solana outage in mid-February, Avalanche got hit by a major crash on Friday, when a bug in its code forced the entire network into a halt and caused a major panic among developers.
The network is back online now, but here's what really happened.
According to Avalanche's status page, the entire network crashed and stopped finalizing blocks at 11:13 UTC on Friday, 23 February 23.
Transactions stopped getting processed, and the network froze.
Kevin Sekniqi, the co-founder of Ava Labs, initially speculated that the crash might have been due to issues with blockchain inscriptions.
However, later on, the cause of the problem was identified as a bug in Avalanche's code, that caused an "excessive amount of gossip" between validator nodes.
In essence, the validator nodes were sending more information than necessary to each other, wearing themselves out and eventually becoming too overwhelmed to reach consensus.
Seqniki identified the issue as a "gossip-related" bug that had nothing to do with inscriptions after all.
Similar to how the Solana issue was fixed, the Avalanche developers released a software update for the Avalanche nodes, bringing the network back to life between 15:59 UTC and 16:36 UTC, after most of the validators had updated their nodes (about 4 hours after).
According to data from CoinMarketCap, when the Avalanche crash hit, the price of $AVAX slid down by as much as 3% in a single day.
At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency has recovered most of its losses but is still trading under some serious bearish headwinds under most timeframes.
For example, the snapshot above shows that the cryptocurrency is trading at a -7% loss over the last week.
AVAX is also down by around 1% over the last 4 hours, at the time of writing.
But what if there was reason to believe that Avalanche has better days ahead?
According to the chart snapshot below, Avalanche took a pretty serious beating somewhere around $50, causing it to decline and retest the ascending trendline illustrated.
The cryptocurrency has hit the ascending trendline shown above, for the third time, and could be set to rebound from here.
The support level to keep an eye out for at this point, is the $33.6 support.
If Avalanche breaks below this price level, we might be set to witness another plunge to the $27.3 zone or lower.
Price targets include anywhere between AVAX's $50 high from 24 December last year to the $55.4 resistance or even higher.
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