Why the Blockchain Halted on May 29th, 2016

Yesterday we encountered a critical issue with the Lisk client, which caused block generation to stop for approximately 6 hours. No user funds were in danger. We have now released Lisk v0.3.1, which successfully resolves the issues found in the previous release.

What went wrong?

The Lisk account 7280969963593626387L sent 1 LSK to an incorrect Lisk account 000007280969963593626387L. Unfortunately, Lisk v0.3.0 did not have the proper address validations in place, therefore the blockchain couldn’t include the erroneous transaction into a block and came to an abrupt stop, affecting all delegates with the same version installed. Lisk v0.3.1 introduces the proper address validations, and therefore should prevent the issue from happening again.

Reward offset increased

In Lisk v0.3.0, we had a block reward offset of 60,480 blocks. That means during the first week there would be no inflationary rewards at all, and afterwards one block would yield 5 LSK for the active delegates. Obviously, at that point community delegates would have to be in the top 101. This is not the case at this moment, but definitely will be in the future.

Before this switch can happen we need to make the Lisk blockchain completely stable, and iron out some outstanding issues. We know that this is an unpopular decision, however there is no other way around it. Therefore, we have moved the block reward offset temporarily to an arbitrary number of 1,451,520 blocks, i.e. six months from the launch date. Please note, this is not the real offset, we will endeavour to make Lisk stable far sooner. It is meant as a safety margin for the Lisk team to resolve the remaining issues asap.