Polkadot parachains sees temporary halt in block production after major network upgrade

Polkadot parachains briefly stopped producing blocks on April 21 after the network’s runtime upgrade went live on its mainnet.

Moonbeam, an Ethereum-compatible smart contract parachain, confirmed the incident, stating that its platform stopped producing blocks for approximately 1 hour. It added:

“Moonbeam resumed block production at approximately 11:36 am UTC. At this time, the network is operating normally. We are waiting on incident details from the Polkadot core dev team and will share more information at a later time.”

Dustin Lee, the co-founder of Polkadot-based marketplace DeStore Network, further explained that the problems arose following the deployment of the runtime 1.2 upgrade.

Interestingly, Bill Laboon, the Director of Education and Governance Initiatives at Web3 Foundation, developers of Polkadot, pointed out that the latest upgrade also impacted some wallets and interfaces. However, he noted that this was only a user interface problem.

He explained:

“You may see some issues with staking UIs (showing nominations and rewards) in various wallets. This is just a UI issue, not a problem with staking itself, and no action is needed from users.”

These issues are arriving less than a week after Polkadot’s founder, Gavin Wood, unveiled the proposal for the JAM upgrade.

The upgrade is designed to replace the Relay Chain with a more modular, minimalistic design while offering a decentralized hybrid system that combines Ethereum’s smart contract features with Polkadot’s architectural framework.

DOT price unchanged

Polkadot’s native DOT token appears unimpacted by the negatives surrounding the recent skirmishes.

CryptoSlate data shows it is one of the best-performing top 20 digital assets in the last 24 hours, rising by approximately 5% during the reporting period to as high as $7.56 as of press time.

Notably, this reflects the recent interest in Polkadot, as CryptoSlate reported that institutional investors were shifting funds away from significant digital assets toward its ecosystem.

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