The privacy-focused Zcash network completely stopped creating new blocks for more than four hours on Wednesday, a rare and alarming outage for the system.
Think of a blockchain as a ledger that continues to grow as new transactions are added. Each “block” is a new entry in the ledger. Therefore, when the network stops creating new blocks, new transactions can no longer be confirmed. This is like freezing the entire payment system for several hours.
According to Zcash block explorers, the latest block is number 3,364,601 and was created on June 3rd at 5:27 AM UTC. After that, no new blocks appeared for more than 4 hours. Typically, Zcash adds a new block approximately every 75 seconds (just over a minute).
Zcash’s native token ZEC has surged 8% over the past week, bucking the broader market’s weakness, according to CoinDesk data. The token has gained 46% in the last month.
For crypto investors, the incident is a reminder that even well-known cryptocurrencies can run into technical problems. Zcash has not released any official statement regarding this issue.
