Ontology has re-enabled its mainnet after around 41 hours without blocks.
The team said no funds from the network were lost but has not yet named the ecosystem project or the vulnerability behind the shutdown.
A security warning froze block production at 16:43 UTC on October 10
The layer-one network stopped producing blocks on October 10 around 16:43 UTC. A pressing warning about a project running on the chain set off the halt, Ontology’s announcements said.
The team coordinated with most of its consensus nodes to halt the new blocks. Transactions stopped settling.
Ontology framed its move as a precaution against a potential threat to network assets. It did not say what project the alarm was triggered by, or what the weakness was.
Block production resumed at around 09:57 UTC on October 12. The restart notice did not specify anything else and cited “a security incident involving an ecosystem project.”
In the meantime, Bitget and Coinone of South Korea suspended deposits and withdrawals of Ontology-network assets.
“Ontology’s core infrastructure remains safe, with no funds lost from the Ontology network itself,” the Ontology team wrote on X. The freeze was described as a move with consensus nodes “to support the investigation and mitigate potential risks.”
The statement only addresses the network’s current status, not the unnamed project or its users’ funds. There was no technical write-up accompanying the restart notice.
Ontology uses a consensus method called Verifiable Byzantine Fault Tolerance, or VBFT. VBFT blends staking and coordinated validation and allows participating nodes to jointly stop the network if the operators judge the risk to be high enough.
The team labeled the October halt a precautionary pause
Ontology already took a pause in 2026. The confirmed malicious activity started as a security alert on August 31, was remediated and required a mandatory software upgrade before operations resumed around September 2.
Ontology then compelled all sync nodes to upgrade to version 3.1.5.
This time Ontology called the stop a precautionary pause. It has not reported any compromise of the protocol itself.
On August 30, Cronos validators halted block production to curb an exploit on the Tectonic lending market.
A hacker pumped the TONIC token about 100 times in 20 minutes and used it to borrow money. Cryptopolitan reported that about $75 million was exposed, but only about $6 million made it to Ethereum before the chain was frozen.
Cronos operators undid between 10,000 and 11,000 blocks, which erased about two hours of history. In August and September, security issues caused outages at ICON, Injective, and MultiversX as well.
MANTRA shut down its network in August due to an incident that wasn’t made public. Transactions stopped and OM balances were frozen.
If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.