The price of DEGEN has crashed 22% since May 12 amid the downtime.
Degen Chain, a Layer 3 network running on top of Base, has resumed operations after failing to produce a block for more than 50 hours.
According to Degen Chain’s block explorer, the network ceased producing blocks on May 12 and remained dormant for two days before coming back online.
“Degen Chain is up and running again — thanks for hanging in there,” the project tweeted on May 15. “We really appreciate your patience and support.”
Degen’s third-party infrastructure provider, Conduit, reported that the downtime was caused by a configuration change that halted block production. The change resulted in less than five addresses flooding the network with a high volume of failed transactions, triggering the outage.
“These addresses had tens of millions of failed transactions and were stalling the replay process,” Conduit tweeted. “Transactions from these addresses can be replayed, but on a delay that does not prevent the network from coming back online.”
The price of DEGEN is down 22% since May 12, according to CoinGecko.
Degen rising
The lengthy outage came just a few weeks after activity on Degen Chain surged to unprecedented highs amid the third season of its second airdrop campaign.
On April 25, the network ranked as the top Ethereum Layer 2 or Layer 3 network by throughput after processing 43.4 transactions per second (TPS), according to L2beat. The impressive performance even surpassed the all-time high of Base — the Layer 2 network leveraged by Degen Chain for settlement — which hosted a record high of 37 TPS on April 8.
However, Degen Chain’s on-chain activity quickly subsided once claims for the latest season of its airdrop campaign went live on April 30. DegenChain’s throughput crashed 73% roughly a week after its record high, coming in at 11.4 TPS on May 1.
Degen Chain
While Degen Chain went live on March 28, the project burst onto the web3 scene as a meme token in early January.
The DEGEN token was airdropped to users of Farcaster, a popular web3 social network, on Jan. 7. DEGEN then captured headlines in March as a top-performing asset amid a memecoin trading resurgence on Base, with the token posting an all-time high of $0.0568 on April 1 after skyrocketing more than 3,000% in roughly two weeks.
The project sought to capitalize on its momentum with the launch of a low-fee Layer 3 network built using the Arbitrum Orbit tech stack and leveraging AnyTrust for data availability on March 28. The DEGEN token now functions as Degen Chain’s native gas token.
While Degen Chain initially served as a new home for the DEGEN token and community, the project quickly invited third-party developers to build on top of the network.
However, the network’s ecosystem currently hosts a total value locked of just $2.15 million, down 79% from its April 1 all-time high of $10.5 million, according to DeFi Llama.
The network’s leading protocol is DegenSwap, a decentralized exchange hosting a TVL of $1.26 million and pre-outage daily volume of roughly $102,000, according to CoinMarketCap.
The DEGEN token boasts a market cap of $197 million.
