It appears things are going from bad to worse for the NEO ecosystem as of right now. After the recent failure of a consensus node, it seems the blockchain ran into more problems this week. Blocks were generated a very long time apart, which is rather unusual. Some network transactions never arrived at their destinations either. It’s a very worrisome development for the world’s sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
NEO Network Crumbles Once Again
It is neither the first nor the last time we will see issues affecting the NEO blockchain. Until the team finalizes their decentralized consensus mode approach, issues like these can happen at any given time. With just a handful of consensus nodes supporting this network right now, it doesn’t take much to make the network grind to a halt.
Earlier this week, one of the consensus nodes disconnected and left the network “hanging” for quite some time. The issue was eventually fixed and NEO went back to normal, as one would expect. That situation did not last all that long, as new issues arose later this week. With the block generation time increasing, it took users a lot longer to move funds from one address to the next.
It appears this was partially due to a few nodes suffering from synchronization issues. This is not an uncommon issue in the world of cryptocurrency, yet it can cause problems when there are less than a dozen nodes powering an entire network. As such, users who broadcast NEO transactions to other addresses at times didn’t see their transactions being accepted by the network. Tracing a particular transaction using a block explorer is also impossible, as the network has no recollection of the event taking place.
For users of the Binance exchange, this certainly caused a lot of problems. With the exchange not crediting deposits, a lot of users were quick to cry foul. It is evident this issue affecting the NEO blockchain makes all other service providers look bad as well. It appears there was nothing Binance could do about this development other than wait for the NEO developers to fix this latest issue. That seems to have already happened, although some transactions are still experiencing issues.
With the NEO blockchain suffering from multiple incidents in rather quick succession, a lot of people are wondering about the state of this project. It is evident issues like these are growing pains, yet they shouldn’t even exist given this currency’s market position and reputation. It takes half a day or longer to fix these issues every time, which further underscores that the current situation has become almost unmanageable.
For the time being, we will have to wait and see how this affects the future of NEO. This news couldn’t have come at a worse time, as all cryptocurrency markets are subject to immense volatility right now. With prices crashing hard, the last thing we need right now is blockchain issues affecting any of the top currencies. Unfortunately, heavily centralized models are more prone to issues compared to other solutions.
