Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol dYdX has announced that it is currently investigating a recent pause in block production during a scheduled upgrade of the chain.
At 5:30 am UTC on April 8, dYdX released a status report stating that the chain was undergoing a scheduled protocol upgrade, which could potentially disrupt the functionalities of the dYdX Chain.
However, after the completion of the maintenance, the chain did not resume block production as expected.
As of now, the blockchain explorer platform, Nodes Guru, indicates that the latest blocks produced by the dYdX mainnet were from the time of the scheduled upgrade, which occurred five hours ago.
DYdX has also confirmed that the chain encountered an issue and stated at 6:50 am UTC that their team is actively debugging it. However, they mentioned that the issue is still under investigation and may not be resolved until later.
The proposed protocol upgrade, which was announced on February 21, included various advancements such as order book features, risk and safety improvements, and Cosmos-related enhancements.
This interruption comes after a recent development in dYdX, where the community approved the staking of 20 million tokens. On April 6, the dYdX community voted to allow $61 million worth of treasury tokens to be staked on the liquid staking protocol called Stride.
DYdX emphasized that this decision was made due to the increase in trading activity within the protocol. They stated, “The rate of DYDX being staked to validators has plateaued, and deposits to the exchange are growing at a tremendous pace.”
It is worth noting that the dYdX Chain previously experienced a targeted attack in November 2023, resulting in $9 million in losses. On January 3, the protocol announced that they had identified the attacker and were considering taking legal action. They also mentioned that they had made improvements to their trading platform to enhance monitoring and alerts.