Starknet Mainnet Halted Again: Fresh Outage Freezes Ethereum L2 for Over 2 Hours
Starknet, an Ethereum layer-2 system that’s based mostly on zero-knowledge rollups, skilled one other mainnet outage on Monday that halted community operations for over two hours and as soon as once more questioned the soundness of Starknet as an operational system because it enters 2026.
Starknet builders reported the outage on X as a publish, saying engineers have been investigating the difficulty.
Starknet is at the moment experiencing downtime. Our staff is actively investigating the difficulty and dealing to revive full performance as shortly as attainable. Thank you for your persistence.
— Starknet (BTCFi arc)
(@Starknet) January 5, 2026
No instant rationalization was given for the reason for the outage. At the time of the preliminary replace, block manufacturing had stalled for simply over two hours, leaving customers unable to submit or finalize transactions.
Despite Strong Metrics, Starknet Halt Stops All On-Chain Activity
On-chain information from Starknet’s block explorer showed the community had processed greater than 264 million transactions since launch and supported over 56,000 energetic accounts, with common transaction charges sitting beneath one cent.
Total worth locked stood at roughly $840 million. Despite these metrics, the halt successfully paused all exercise throughout decentralized functions, wallets, and good contracts in the course of the downtime.
The explorer later indicated that block manufacturing had resumed, with new blocks showing minutes after the incident was acknowledged publicly.
Starknet is designed to batch transactions off-chain and submit cryptographic proofs to Ethereum, permitting it to scale decentralized finance, gaming, and different good contract use circumstances whereas counting on Ethereum for settlement and safety.
Starknet, Zcash, and Dash publish agency beneficial properties as selective rotation favors tokens with energetic utilization, liquidity, and identifiable drivers.#altcoin #zcash #zechttps://t.co/EKHTVvlCSY
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The community has additionally positioned itself as a bridge for Bitcoin-related decentralized finance, selling what it calls a BTCFi enlargement throughout the Ethereum ecosystem.
The newest outage interrupted these ambitions, not less than briefly, as builders and customers waited for regular operations to renew.
The disruption follows a tough yr for the community. In September 2025, Starknet skilled a much more extreme incident after deploying a serious improve referred to as Grinta, model 0.14.0.
That replace, supposed to advance decentralization by introducing a number of sequencers, triggered an prolonged halt in block manufacturing that lasted roughly 9 hours.
During that episode, the community required two chain reorganizations, rolling again round an hour of exercise and forcing customers to resubmit transactions.
Starknet Outage Adds to Growing Pattern of Network Interruptions
A autopsy published after the September outage traced the failure to a mix of things.
Different sequencers have been working with inconsistent views of Ethereum on account of points with RPC suppliers, which disrupted block proposals.
A separate software program bug within the element accountable for updating Starknet’s state compounded the issue when dealing with reverted transactions, in the end main the staff to manually halt the chain to protect correctness.
In April 2024, Starknet suffered a four-hour outage after a rounding error triggered block reorganizations, filling transaction capability earlier than builders cleared the backlog and restored regular community operations.
While the most recent halt seems shorter and fewer extreme than the September incident, it provides to a sample of interruptions throughout Starknet’s transition towards a extra decentralized structure.
Such halts sometimes end in delayed or failed transactions, momentary inaccessibility of funds and providers, and downtime for functions constructed on the community.
In earlier incidents, some centralized exchanges briefly suspended STRK deposits and withdrawals as a precaution, though buying and selling typically continued internally.
Market response to the most recent outage was muted. STRK was buying and selling around $0.089, up about 1.3% over the previous 24 hours, with day by day buying and selling quantity rising greater than 38% to roughly $63.7 million.
The token stays sharply beneath its early-2024 peak above $4, reflecting broader market situations and lingering issues round provide and community reliability quite than a single occasion.
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