Dash Blockchain stops producing blocks after Hard Fork activation

Following the implementation of the Dash Core v19 hard fork, the Dash blockchain experienced a block generation halt that lasted more than twenty hours. On May 21, Samuel Westrich, Chief Technology Officer for Dash, a privacy-first blockchain platform, announced on Twitter that the platform had ceased operations and was unable to produce blocks due to an issue that occurred during the v19 activation process.

Several hours later, the developers reported that they had discovered some issues and were actively working to fix them. We are currently balancing the requirement to maintain block formation with the ambition to address these concerns. According to a recent tweet by “Pasta”, a Dash developer, it is not safe to assume that blocks and transactions on the Dash network without ChainLocks and InstantSend seals have true finality.

The Dash network is secured against 51% of attacks by the ChainLock feature, and instant transfers are enabled through InstantSend. Around 13 hours after block generation ceased, developers issued an update that is expected to resolve the chain deadlock once a sufficient number of masternodes and miners have completed the upgrade. The first upgrade to v19 will be delayed until June 14, according to the preliminary release. According to the statements made by developers on a Dash subreddit forum, the issues appear to have resulted in the splitting of the blockchain into two separate variants.

According to the statement of Reddit user “xkcdmpx”, about 10% of the network has advanced on a fork, but the majority of users consider this chain unauthorized. Postponing the primary hard fork will give developers additional time to resolve the underlying issue and determine the cause of the chain termination.
The distribution of DASH mining rewards from Binance will be temporarily suspended until block production returns to normal, according to the company’s announcement. At the time of writing, the Dash blockchain explorer has reported a lack of new entries being produced by the network for a duration of 20 hours and 33 minutes.