Testnet Retro - Launch Day | Aztec Blog

Aztec’s Public Testnet launched to a wave of enthusiastic activity and dApp experimentation, but it quickly ran into network congestion issues that throttled block production. The main culprit was a bottleneck in the sequencer mempool, which hit its 100MB cap across validators. Since all sequencers used the same default fee settings, their mempools diverged, and validators began randomly evicting transactions, making it difficult to finalize blocks consistently. This instability slowed the network and temporarily impaired validator coordination. To restore network health, Aztec increased the mempool size, leading to better alignment across validators and improved attestation reliability.