Paradex Forces Chain Rollback to Block 1604710 After Maintenance Triggers Liquidations
The Starknet-based appchain wipes recent history to restore user balances after “abnormal funding rates” wrecked positions during a database upgrade.
Paradex, the Starknet-based perpetuals appchain, initiated a forced chain rollback early Monday following a botched database upgrade that left the protocol offline and users reporting erroneous liquidations. The exchange confirmed it is reverting the network state to Block 1604710 (04:27:54 UTC), effectively erasing all on-chain activity occurring after that timestamp.
The "Delete" Button
The incident began during a scheduled maintenance window initially set for 05:15 UTC. According to the official status page, the upgrade encountered critical database failures, extending the downtime well beyond the projected 30-minute window. During the instability, traders reported "abnormal funding rates" that triggered forced liquidations on open positions despite the frontend being largely inaccessible.
Paradex’s decision to execute a rollback, a controversial maneuver in DeFi that sacrifices immutability for fund recovery, aims to restore all account balances to their pre-maintenance state. "This is the last known valid state," the protocol stated in an update, confirming that the reversion invalidates the erroneous liquidations but also wipes any legitimate transactions processed in the interim.
The chain state will be rolled back to block 1604710… All accounts will be reverted to the state before the database maintenance. Paradex Status Update
Starknet Ecosystem Strain
This outage compounds growing friction for Starknet-based infrastructure. The rollback follows a separate January 4 incident where a user claimed a $219,000 loss due to pricing errors on the platform. While Paradex operates as a Layer 3 appchain distinct from the main Starknet L2, the reliability issues weigh on the broader ecosystem sentiment.
Starknet (STRK) traded down to $0.081 (-4.2%) following the news, reflecting wider market weakness and specific concerns over the network’s application layer stability. The rollback highlights a persistent centralization risk in Layer 2 and Layer 3 architectures: the ability for sequencers to rewrite history when technical execution fails.
