Ethereum Infrastructure Service Provider Infura Suffers Outage, Exchange Halt ETH Withdrawals

11. Nov 2020 Posted by Akolkar B on News

Infura, the Ethereum infrastructure provider has suffered a significant outage today as some of the major exchanges has halted ETH withdrawals. Some of the major crypto exchanges like Bithumb, Binance, and Upbeat have also halted withdrawal for other ERC-20 tokens in addition to ETH withdrawal.

Infura provides API access to the Ethereum network along with other services and application. The official website of Infura has described this issue as an “ETH1 Mainnet API service degradation”. However, the recent update notes that its investigating team has identified the root cause and is working on restoring the functionality.

The official website reads: “We’ve brought additional capacity online for the affected components and are continuing to triage the root cause of the outage. System recovery operations are in progress”.

Many market players have suggested that a huge network like Ethereum should not be dependent on a single service provider. Infura is currently the AWS of the Ethereum ecosystem. A large number of projects are currently using Infura including exchanges and MetaMask, to get data from the exchange.

Some of the major affected components from the outage include mainnet logs, mainnet filters, Ethereum mainnet archive data, mainnet HTTPS JSON-RPC API, and mainnet WebSocket JSON-RPC API.

Lead developer at Blockchain - Nikita Zhavoronkov - said that Ethereum developers introduced a change in code leading to a chain split. He added that “technically” it was an unannounced hardfork and something similar had happened in the Bitcoin network 7 years ago during a database upgrade.

While some of the big crypto exchanges have stopped the ETH withdrawal, the price remains unaffected at this stage. At press time, Ethereum is trading at a price of $460 with a market cap of $52.1 billion.

So far, the Ethereum (ETH) price has surged more than 200% year-to-date. Last week, the deposits contracts for Ethereum 2.0 went live allowing stakers to participate. The Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain launch is scheduled for December 1.