Arbitrum is Down on Network Traffic Surge

Arbitrum, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, suffered a partial outage early today due to a surge in network activity.

“The Arbitrum One Sequencer stalled at 10:29 AM ET during a significant surge in network traffic,” according to a post on the project’s X account. “We are working to resolve this as quickly as possible and will provide a post-mortem as soon as possible.”

Arbitrum's ARB token has dropped 4.4% to $1.13 at noon New York time.

Without a clear indication of what is happening, some crypto users claim the outage is due to inscriptions, an NFT-style transaction standard that originated on Bitcoin, and has since spread to other blockchains.

“Ordinals stress testing various blockchains is certainly entertaining to watch,” posted Martin Koppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis, who added “Now they brought the Arbitrum sequencer down.”

Inscriptions have been at the center of fierce debate in the Web3 space, as the token standard extends to Avalanche, BNB Chain, Dogecoin, and Near Protocol among others.