Polygon zkEVM Resumes Operation Following Major Outage

Polyogn zkEVM, the flagship scaling solution from Polygon, is back to normal operation after suffering a major outage.

Polygon reported the issue on Saturday night, attributing the issue to a sequencer fault following a Layer 1. The team emphasized that the issue was contained to zkEVM and that all other Polygon networks continued to function without issue.

The project followed up 27 hours later to announce that Polygon zkEVM had resumed its usual operations after intervention from its Emergency Council. Any further system updates will be subject to a 10-day timelock before activation after the network exited emergency state mode.

Polygon’s MATIC token is up 5% in 24 hours amid a broader crypto market bounce despite the outage, according to CoinGecko.

The incident follows a sluggish launch for Polygon zkEVM following the deployment of its mainnet beta in March 2023, with the network’s throughput and total value locked (TVL) lagging behind rival zero-knowledge rollups while transaction fees remain high.

Polygon’s zkEVM’s strongest-ever daily throughput was posted in August when it processed just 1.41 transactions per second (TPS) over 24 hours. The stat ranks Polygon zkEVM 23rd among 35 Layer 2 networks ranked by L2beat, with zkSync Era, a leading zero-knowledge rollup, topping the list at 62 TPS.

Despite the weak throughput, Polygon zkEVM’s fees consistently outpaced zkSync Era, Starknet, and Linea throughout March.

Polygon zkEVM’s transaction fees have not dropped alongside other L2s following the launch of Ethereum’s Dencun hard fork two weeks ago due to Polygon chains not yet supporting EIP-4844. Polygon is preparing to roll out support for EIP-4844 next month.

Polygon zkEVM’s network TVL has also grown fairly slow, likely due to the absence of a potential airdrop for early users. The network currently ranks 14th and is host to $157 million worth of assets, while Starknet is sixth with $1.53 billion, zkSync Era is ninth with $765 million, and Linea is 10th with $424 million.

However, in June, Polygon announced plans to later merge its zkEVM and PoS sidechain, with the latter network currently hosting $1.18 billion within its DeFi ecosystem, according to DeFi Llama.