Starknet Mainnet Halted: Block Production Freezes in Second Major Outage Since ‘Grinta’
Block production has stopped for over four hours due to a prover mismatch, marking Starknet’s second major failure since September 2025.
Starknet (STRK) has frozen. The zero-knowledge Layer-2 halted block production early Monday, leaving millions in TVL stranded and forcing dApps offline for over four hours. This marks the second major infrastructure failure for the network since its controversial Grinta upgrade in late 2025.
The Technical Break
The blackout began when the network stopped processing new blocks, a condition the team confirmed was triggered by a critical mismatch between block execution and the proving system. While users can sign transactions, they are not being finalized on-chain. Liquidity is effectively trapped until engineers resolve the discrepancy.
Our team is actively investigating the issue and working to restore full functionality as quickly as possible.
This isn’t an isolated incident. In September 2025, the rollout of Starknet v0.14.0 (Grinta) triggered a nine-hour collapse that necessitated two separate chain reorganizations to fix. A messy reality for a protocol pitching itself as the future of decentralized scaling.
Market Apathy
Traders shrugged off the news. STRK hovered at $0.089, barely moving despite the catastrophic failure. The lack of panic selling suggests a market that has largely priced in Starknet’s technical fragility, or simply stopped paying attention. Volume remains thin.
The Institutional Risk
For institutional allocators, uptime is the only metric that counts. Ethereum L2s are fighting a war for dominance, and recurring downtime is a fatal flaw for teams building production-grade financial applications. While no funds are currently reported at risk, the inability to transact destroys the “trustless” guarantee central to the L2 thesis.
