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Avalanche Blockchain's X and C Networks See Brief Outage

On-chain data shows that transactions sent over X-Chain are lagging, while C-Chain has recovered from an earlier outage.

Updated Mar 23, 2023, 3:27 p.m. Published Mar 23, 2023, 7:37 a.m.

Avalanche’s AVAX token fell nominally after nodes on the protocol’s X- and C-Chains went down due to bugs in a new software release.

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Avalanche is unique as it uses three chains: the C-Chain, X-Chain and P-Chain.

The C-Chain is home to Avalanche’s decentralized finance (DeFi) community and is the chain that hosts smart contracts and is used with MetaMask. The X-Chain is the exchange chain, used to send funds back and forth. The P-Chain is the platform chain, which is used for staking AVAX and serving as a validator.

While the C-Chain recovered after an hour-long outage, some X-Chain nodes are still offline as of time of publication.

On-chain data shows the network quality of X-Chain has been degraded, and it's only able to process a handful of transactions. It appears that it's only able to process a few transactions per hour, making the chain virtually unusable.

Over 90% of validators have upgraded to the latest version of AvalancheGo. This is up from 12% earlier Thursday.

While Avalanche has yet to make a public statement regarding the outage, many contributors are working on its GitHub forum to resolve the issue.

AVAX is trading for $16.89 at writing time in Asian afternoon hours on Thursday.

AVAX Avalanche On-chain Data

Sam Reynolds

Sam Reynolds is a senior reporter based in Asia. Sam was part of the CoinDesk team that won the 2023 Gerald Loeb award in the breaking news category for coverage of FTX's collapse. Prior to CoinDesk, he was a reporter with Blockworks and a semiconductor analyst with IDC.