How Aptos’ outage halted deposits and withdrawals

• The Aptos blockchain went off for almost five hours, causing a hold-up in on-chain and exchange transactions.
• Transactions have resumed and interest in trading APT increased.

Layer-1 blockchain Aptos [APT] experienced a blackout as its network went off for more than four hours on the early morning of 19 October. According to the Aptos Block Explorer, on-chain transactions on the blockchain stopped happening at 7:11 UTC+8 at block 104621314 on the said date. It remained the same up until past 11:00 UTC+8.

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At first, the reason for the disruption was unclear. But moments later, the official handle of Aptos on X (formerly Twitter), posted that congestion on the network could have been responsible for the downtime.

However, on-chain transactions were not the only ones affected by the outage, as exchanges also felt the heat. As a result, exchanges like OKX paused withdrawals and deposits for the APT token.

South Korean-based exchange Upbit, through its service center, also informed its community that it would be taking the same step so as to mitigate the risk of any loss of funds.

It was also interesting to note that the outage occurred a year after the Aptos Mainnet launched.  In celebration of its one-year anniversary, the blockchain had posted some of its achievements days before the blockchain went off.

According to Aptos, which operates on the Move programming language, 111 nodes actively contributed to the network’s security and robustness. Also, Aptos noted that it facilitates 290 million transactions among 7.3 million wallets.

One area where it seemed to have been majorly achieved was in terms of Transactions Per Second (TPS). Recall that the project had challenges living up to its promise of a higher TPS in its early days. But now Aptos could boast that:

“Aptos reached a peak TPS (Transactions Per Second) of 5,862, highlighting its high throughput capabilities. This not only sets the bar for performance but also ensures users experience swift and reliable transactions on the network.”

As the network resumes, so does trading

As expected, Aptos volume stalled during the period of the network blackout. However, according to Santiment, the volume was back up to 88.67 million at press time. This increase was a testament to the revival in transactions between external wallets and exchange addresses.

Another metric that supported the assertion was APT’s open interest per exchange. This metric describes the liquidity accompanied by the activity of traders in connection with a token. 

At the time of writing, the open interest per exchange was up to $38.09 million after it initially plunged to $36.59 million. This means that there has been an increase in the number of spot and futures trading on the platforms. 

Source: Santiment

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Meanwhile, Aptos confirmed that the issue had been resolved. Also, a quick look at the blockchain’s explorer showed that transactions were back with a plethora of them happening in the last few seconds.