Urgent Main Chain Upgrade for BPoS Validators

January 19, 2026

Quick summary

More than 12 BPoS validator nodes went offline at the same time, disrupting block production and pushing the Elastos main chain into PoW-only mode.

All BPoS node owners must run ~/node/node.sh ela update command. This coordinated upgrade resets consensus and triggers a safe reorg to restore normal BPoS operation.

What Happened on the Elastos Main Chain, and Why BPoS Nodes Must Upgrade Now

A validator outage recently disrupted block production on the Elastos main chain and pushed the network into PoW-only mode. This post explains what happened first, then what BPoS node owners need to do.

What happened

Elastos main chain validation runs in repeating cycles:

1 cycle = 36 blocks
In each cycle, 36 random BPoS nodes are selected to validate blocks proposed by merge miners

During the incident, more than 12 validator nodes went offline at roughly the same time. 11 of those validators were hosted by a single party, plus a few others. Because these offline nodes were still being selected within the 36-validator set, block production could not return to normal through routine rotation.

Normally, if nodes fail to produce blocks for 3 consecutive cycles, they are removed from consensus. That would be:

3 × 36 = 108 blocks
about 216 minutes on average

In this case, the outage triggered a cascade, leaving the BPoS state unstable and causing the main chain to fall back to PoW-only mode.

The operator responsible for most of the offline nodes is investigating the cause and has added an auto-restart mechanism to reduce the chance of a repeat.