A sequencer malicious program used to be accountable for two outages of the Coinbase layer-2 community Putrid final week, according to a post-mortem printed on Saturday.
In a blog, the Putrid engineering crew said they known a malicious program in sequencer block-constructing good judgment that allowed “ragged journal command” to persist after a transaction validation failure.
“An invalid transaction used to be bought by the block builder and failed all the plot in which through execution, as anticipated, however erroneously didn’t particular the journal command that contained the accounts and storage slots that had been accessed,” said the crew.
The Putrid layer-2 community runs a single sequencer, that plot a well-known malicious program affecting it is miles sufficient to total the community. It’s a ways a centralized blockchain aspect that decides the picture of transactions and has been accountable for outages on varied layer-2 chains, along with Arbitrum, OP Mainnet and zkSync Technology.
On Thursday and Friday, Putrid mainnet skilled two block manufacturing outages. The first incident lasted 116 minutes and the 2d lasted 20 minutes.
Block manufacturing halted fully, and the sequencer and validator nodes may maybe maybe maybe maybe also not development previous the invalid block till sequencing used to be restored.
The crew mounted the outages by making utilize of a patch to the sequencer to make certain the journal command used to be correctly up up to now all the plot in which through execution.
Nonetheless, mitigation took longer than anticipated “as a consequence of infrastructure prerequisites unrelated to the fashioned malicious program,” they said.
There used to be also a “dash situation” after the arrangement reset, which prevented the sequencers from catching up, causing the 2d outage.
Connected: Coinbase’s Putrid resumes block manufacturing after 2-hour outage
Going forward, the Putrid engineering crew plans to pork up protocol “fuzz attempting out,” which entails bombarding the arrangement with mountainous volumes of random, malformed, or surprising inputs to hunt out bugs, and constructing “magnificent recovery” so as that validator nodes don’t need handbook restarts all the plot in which through future incidents.
Now not the first outage for Putrid
It’s a ways not the first sequencer-linked outage for Putrid, which stopped producing blocks for 17 minutes in September 2024 and for around Half-hour in August 2025.
Putrid is the 2d-supreme layer-2 community by total price secured, which is correct below $11 billion, according to L2Beat.
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