Starknet, an Ethereum layer‑2 community that makes use of zero‑data (ZK) rollups, is experiencing recent mainnet disruption because the challenge enters 2026.
In an X publish, the Starknet crew stated the community was going through downtime and that engineers had been “actively investigating the problem and dealing to revive full performance as shortly as attainable,” 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–based mostly layer 2 that batches transactions offchain and posts cryptographic proofs to Ethereum, aiming to ship larger throughput and decrease charges for good contracts, decentralized finance and gaming purposes whereas inheriting Ethereum’s base‑layer safety.
The challenge has additionally promoted a Bitcoin DeFi, or BTCFi, arc, pitching itself as infrastructure for bringing Bitcoin‑associated monetary purposes into the Ethereum ecosystem. Regardless of the community disruption, the STRK token worth 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 underneath nearer scrutiny. In September, a serious improve generally known as Grinta (v0.14.0) led to an prolonged mainnet disruption during 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 stated 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 conduct, prompting the crew to decide to architectural modifications and expanded monitoring.
A consultant from Starknet advised Cointelegraph that the crew was working to restore the recent incident.
