Polygon (MATIC) suffers a network outage causing a wave of angry users

polygon developers yesterday alerted users to an issue related to the Tendermint deployment, resulting in network downtime.

Network update:
The team is currently investigating an issue with the Tendermint implementation used by one of the two layers of the Polygon PoS chain.
All user funds and data remain completely secure, but there is a potential threat that Polygon PoS users experience downtime from time to time.

— Polygon Devs 💜 (@0xPolygonDevs) March 10, 2022

The development team said it had implemented a “temporary hotfix” to restore block production several hours later. But the search for a longer-term solution is active, indicating that the problem has not been fully resolved.

“We appreciate your support during this time and have an update: We have implemented a temporary hotfix to unlock the Bor chain and resume production of blocks on the Polygon chain. While this fix is temporary, the team is working to roll out a longer-term update to address the Heimdall issue.”

Although the developers said that funds and data are safe, users expressed frustration with incomplete transactions and lack of funds.

Worse still, others have taken the incident to rekindle rivalry between projects.

What are Tendermint and Heimdall?

The Polygon mainnet is a hybrid Plasma proof-of-stake chain for Ethereum, comprised of a Tendermint consensus validation layer and a Plasma sidechain for block production. Specifically, Polygon uses Peppermint as its “consensus engine,” which is a modified version of Tendermint, the framework that underpins the Cosmos chain.

Heimdall oversees this process by managing validators, selecting block producers, tranches, the state synchronization mechanism between Ethereum and Matic, and other essential functions.

“The mainchain Stake Manager contract works in conjunction with the Heimdall node to act as the trustless stake management mechanism for the PoS engine, including validator set selection, validator update, etc.”

The Heimdall layer validates the blocks produced by the Bor chain, builds a Merkle tree of the block hashes, and then publishes the Merkle root to the main chain.

Merkle trees are a data structure for encoding blockchain data efficiently and securely. They are useful because they offer data compression that allows verification of individual transactions without processing the entire blockchain.

Based on information from the developers, it appears that a flaw at the Peppermint process level meant that the validators could not agree on the state of the network, which halted block production. While the issue has been temporarily fixed, a deeper glitch appears in Heimdall’s cloak.

Community weighs in on Polygon outage

Users have expressed their annoyance at the lack of funds, stuck transactions, and error messages in response to the outage.

The incident has echoed criticism with Polygon. Last month, Justin Bons, chief investment officer at Cyber Capital, launched a scathing attack on Polygon, calling it insecure and centralized.

Bons’ main focus was on setting up the smart contract multi-sig, which would require just five people conspiring to compromise the entire network. This, bonuses he says, it’s “one of the biggest exit hacks or scams just waiting to happen.”

2/14) The Polygon smart contract management key is controlled by a 5 of 8 multi-signature contract.

This means that the polygon can gain complete control over the polygon with only 1 of the 4 outside parties colluding.

The other 4 games in the multisig were also selected by Polygon.

— Justin Bons (@Justin_Bons) February 12, 2022

Adding insult to injury, the top-voted comment on this Reddit post spoke to the irony that, prior to the outage, some had claimed that Polygon’s technology is superior to Cardano’s.

This week, Cardano has come under fire due to allegations that its founder had falsified his academic credentials. Other than that, the Cardano chain has been running continuously since its launch in September 2017.