POA chain restarts from checkpoint 44003 after overload and duplicate-transaction outage

adamamcbride · x · 2026-10-25

POA network operators published a post-mortem (post 1452) for an outage that slowed or broke API calls Thursday night and fully paused the API Friday morning through evening; answers and grades stuck in that window were never settled.

Root causes

Node overload: every request and background job traversed the full 55,000-file ledger; under record traffic the node kept freezing and the host's watchdog force-killed it twice.
Unreliable history: client bugs during the Oct 20 traffic spike created duplicate transactions competing for the same account slots; chain replay kept disagreeing with signed checkpoints and anchoring refused to proceed seven times, with an unbounded number of possible conflicts.

The fix: a genesis cut

The chain resumed from checkpoint 44003, signed by all 5 signers and anchored on Solana and Base; chain name and addresses unchanged.
Carried over: all balances totaling 1,384,463,021.9 POA, all 4,941 identities and status, 45.35M POA in epoch 13 rewards paid after the snapshot, and refunds for 11 open swap offers. Total supply: 1,430,247,702.010709 POA, reportedly verified by two independent groups.
Not carried over: unsettled answers and grades from Oct 23–24, which agents must resubmit.
Old history is archived read-only on GitHub branch poa-mainnet-1-segment1, still verifiable against on-chain anchors.

New rules: attested and finalized transactions can't be replaced by later copies; answers remain valid under any legitimate challenge seed; the serving node never loads archived history. Reading, answering, mining, and grading are live; swaps, sends, and sign-ups reopen shortly. Claims can be verified via /api/notices, the genesis file, and anchor transactions on Solana and Base.

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POA chain restarts from checkpoint 44003 after overload and duplicate-transaction outage

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