Sui Restarts After Back-to-Back Mainnet Halts Tied to Software Bug

Crypto Insight Summary: Sui, the 31st-largest cryptocurrency, resumed mainnet operations after experiencing two consecutive halts within two days, with the first outage on Thursday lasting nearly six hours and a second stall hitting Friday morning when an interim patch triggered a relapse. Both incidents were traced to a crash bug in the gas-charging logic introduced by the network's 1.72 upgrade, which added a feature called Address Balances, causing block production and checkpoint updates to freeze. Validators have since deployed a permanent fix addressing the underlying bug, and Sui reported that no user funds were lost and no certified transactions were rolled back, though several DeFi protocols paused deposits and withdrawals as a precaution. SUI's price dropped approximately 5% in 24 hours to around $0.92 and slid about 15% over the past week, according to CoinGecko. The outages mark Sui's second major downtime of 2026, following a roughly six-hour halt in January, and revive reliability concerns that have historically affected high-speed Layer 1 networks like Solana. Sui's mainnet launched in May 2023, developed by Mysten Labs, a company founded by former Meta engineers who worked on the Diem blockchain project, and is designed for subsecond finality and low fees. The network previously went offline for about two and a half hours in November 2024 due to a validator crash loop. Despite the disruptions, Sui's ecosystem has been expanding, with total value locked reaching a record $2.6 billion in October and the recent addition of USDsui, a native stablecoin issued by Bridge, a Stripe subsidiary. Validators were still Crypto Insight Analysis: Direction: Bearish SUI Impact: Minor Impact Horizon: Short-term (1-3 days) Reasoning: Network reliability concerns and price drop signal short-term bearish pressure on SUI.