Starknet, an Ethereum layer‑2 community that makes use of zero‑data (ZK) rollups, is experiencing contemporary mainnet disruption because the undertaking enters 2026.
In an X put up, the Starknet workforce mentioned the community was going through downtime and that engineers had been “actively investigating the problem and dealing to revive full performance as shortly as doable,” with out instantly disclosing a root trigger. On the time of writing, the community had been experiencing downtime for simply over two hours.
Starknet is a ZK‑rollup–primarily based layer‑2 that batches transactions off‑chain and posts cryptographic proofs to Ethereum, aiming to ship increased throughput and decrease charges for sensible contracts, decentralized finance, and gaming functions whereas inheriting Ethereum’s base‑layer safety.
The undertaking has additionally promoted a Bitcoin DeFi, or BTCFi, arc, pitching itself as infrastructure for bringing Bitcoin‑associated monetary functions into the Ethereum ecosystem. Regardless of the community disruption, the STRK token value held regular on the time of writing.
Associated: Ethereum’s first ZK-rollup, ZKsync Lite, to be retired in 2026
Not the primary time Starknet mainnet is down
The incident follows a collection of outages in 2025 which have put Starknet’s reliability below nearer scrutiny. In September, a serious improve generally known as Grinta (v0.14.0) led to an prolonged mainnet disruption through which block manufacturing was halted, and two chain reorganizations had been required, reverting round an hour of exercise and forcing customers to resubmit affected transactions.
That episode adopted an earlier multi‑hour outage in 2025 tied to sequencer points, with exterior trackers logging a number of incidents of sluggish or halted block creation throughout the 12 months.
A Starknet incident report on the September occasion mentioned the Grinta‑associated downtime lasted roughly 9 hours and traced the issues to a sequence of points, together with failures in Ethereum RPC suppliers and bugs that affected sequencer habits, prompting the workforce to decide to architectural modifications and expanded monitoring.
The consultant from Starknet advised Cointelegraph that the workforce was working to restore the incident.