The mainnet of decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX was paralyzed today as a result of an error in a scheduled protocol update. Investigators at the site are working to determine what happened.

In an incident report, the exchange reported the stoppage of the platform chain after the update to version 4.0.0 of the protocol.

However, 20 minutes after the scheduled maintenance period was completed, the failure arose and, at the time of writing this report, remains. According to data from the Mintscan explorer, the last block, with just four transactions, occurred 6 hours ago.

According to the exchange, “the issue remains under investigation” and it was agreed that the protocol validators will meet at 15:00 UTC.

“This means that the developers will not suggest a solution until then so that validators are not jailed for not being online when the chain is restarted,” indicates the dYdX exchange, which later clarifies: “The problem is being debugged.”

By “imprisoned validator,” the exchange team is referring to the temporary suspension of their participation in the network, which can occur if they are not online once the chain is restarted. So to avoid this, the aforementioned meeting time was scheduled.

The error in the dYdX chain is the first so far in 2024, according to the protocol's own records. It is also the first major outage since version 4 of the chain was launched, which was developed as an independent network built on Cosmos technology.

The stoppage of the dYdX chain occurs shortly after the protocol's community voted in favor of staking more than USD 60 million in DYDX tokens belonging to the exchange's treasury. This, with the intention of improving security and encouraging staking among users.

As explained by the exchange, staked tokens will yield rewards in USD Coin (USDC), which will be automatically combined with DYDX tokens.

Antonio Juliano, founder of dYdX, said on Sunday, April 7, that “the yield from the commissions generated will be continuously used through the Stride platform to purchase DYDX, which will be returned to the exchange treasury.”

As Juliano sees it  users “can simply stake and earn the yield directly (in USDC or easily accumulate DYDX) and at the same time protect the network.”