Chain State Observations

Operational notes from testnet (April 2026). These document real chain conditions encountered during testing — what they look like, what causes them, and how to recover.

PoS Difficulty Spike

Symptom: PoS wallet logs status: NOT_FOUND on every iteration despite having balance.

Cause: A burst of consecutive PoS blocks causes PoS difficulty to ramp exponentially. At 311+ quadrillion difficulty, the wallet's 2,000 LTHN balance can't find a valid kernel.

Recovery: Wait for PoW blocks to land. The hybrid difficulty adjustment lowers PoS difficulty when PoW blocks arrive. The chain self-corrects but may stall for minutes if PoW hashrate is low.

Lesson: A testnet with a single PoW miner and a single PoS staker can get stuck if PoS mints too many consecutive blocks. Production networks with multiple miners won't hit this.

PoS Sequence Factor Limit

Symptom: Wallet logs PoS sequence factor is too high, waiting for a PoW block...

Cause: The daemon enforces a maximum number of consecutive PoS blocks (BLOCK_POS_STRICT_SEQUENCE_LIMIT). When reached, PoS blocks are rejected until a PoW block breaks the sequence.

Recovery: PoW miner must produce a block. If no external miner, the daemon's --start-mining flag with CPU threads can break the deadlock.

Lesson: Hybrid PoW/PoS requires both active. A chain with only stakers will stall at the sequence limit.

POS MINING NOT ALLOWED YET

Symptom: Wallet repeatedly logs POS MINING NOT ALLOWED YET despite having coins and --do-pos-mining enabled.

Cause: The daemon's get_pos_mining_details RPC checks p2p.get_connections_count() — if zero peers and --rpc-ignore-offline is NOT set, it returns DISCONNECTED status which the wallet interprets as "not allowed".

Fix: Add --rpc-ignore-offline to daemon startup flags.

Root code: core_rpc_server.cpp:654 — the peer count check gates PoS mining details.

Transaction Rejected by Daemon

Symptom: transaction was rejected by daemon on alias registration.

Possible causes:

"already in transaction pool by it's address" — one pending alias per address. Wait for current tx to confirm before submitting next.
Stale UTXO — outputs used in the tx were already spent. Wallet needs to refresh.
Duplicate alias — alias already registered on-chain.

Fix: For batch registration, wait for tx pool to clear between submissions. Use multiple wallets for parallel registration.

Block Failed Verification (PoW)

Symptom: mined block has failed to pass verification: id ... @ height N prev_id: ...

Cause: The miner's block template references an old prev_id that no longer matches the chain tip. Happens when the daemon was restarted while the miner had a stale template, or when another block was found between template fetch and submission.

Recovery: Self-corrects — the miner fetches a new template on the next attempt. No action needed unless it persists.

Swagger/API Server Crash (SIGABRT)

Symptom: Daemon crashes immediately with oatpp::swagger::Resources::loadFromFile(): Can't load file '../share/api_server/res/favicon-16x16.png'

Cause: The embedded API server (oatpp/swagger) loads static resources from ../share/api_server/res/ relative to the current working directory (NOT the binary location).

Fix: Either:

Run the daemon from its own directory: cd /opt/lethean/testnet && ./lethean-testnet-chain-node
OR ensure ../share/api_server/res/ exists relative to CWD
Docker: the Dockerfile must copy the share/ directory alongside the binary

API Port Conflict (Mainnet + Testnet)

Symptom: Testnet daemon crashes with oatpp::network::tcp::server::ConnectionProvider: Couldn't bind. Address already in use

Cause: Both mainnet and testnet daemons default to API port 36943. If mainnet is running, testnet can't bind.

Fix: Pass --api-bind-port 46943 to the testnet daemon to use a different API port.

Alias Registration Rate

Observed rate: 1 alias per block cycle (~120 seconds) per wallet.

Bottleneck: Daemon rejects multiple alias registrations from the same address if one is already in the tx pool.

Scaling: Use N wallets in parallel for N registrations per block. 10 wallets = 10 aliases per ~120 seconds = ~7,200/day.

PoW CPU Mining Feasibility

Observation: CPU mining (2 threads) at ProgPoWZ difficulty 474K produced a block after ~10 minutes. This is viable for testnet block production but not economically viable for mainnet where GPU miners dominate.

Use case: --start-mining with CPU threads is useful for:

Breaking PoS sequence deadlocks on testnet
Solo mining on isolated test networks
Keeping a private testnet alive without external miners