Block.One, the Hong Kong-based company that raised a record-breaking $4 billion in an initial coin offering, is in trouble, as its blockchain crashed shortly after launching.

The EOS Mainnet blockchain, pitched as an “operating system” that allows scalable “decentralized autonomous communities” with the support of asynchronous smart contract communication, crashed on Saturday, or officially was “paused.”

Coindesk described its workings more clearly, saying that the EOS blockchain can be compared a cloud computing service like Amazon Web Services Inc.’s in that it’s a platform for the storing or hosting of data. The difference with Block.One is that rather than using a centralized server, EOS is attempting to distribute the data in a distributed system using blockchain technology.

The downtime, described by the company as a coding problem relating “to an issue with how deferred transactions were handled” within the EOS blockchain code, saw the system go down on Saturday.

A fix was rolled out four hours later, but many are focusing on the fact that the EOS blockchain platform itself may have more fundamental issues. Brendan Playford, chief executive officer of Constellation Labs, told Investing.com that the EOS model sacrifices the dream of decentralization at the altar of scalability, highlighting the issue of its mixed model.

The downtime also caused the price of EOS tokens, the tokens issued as part of the ICO, to fall, though only a moderate 3.7 percent, to $10.31, as of 10:30 p.m. EDT Sunday. With the company taking its time launching its product added to the historic number of tokens sold, investors appear to be mostly taking a wait-and-see approach to the company.

In the optimistic view, it’s possible the company may be suffering only from teething issues rather than anything more fundamentally wrong with its code base.

Image: EOS.IO