icp network start fails: 'transaction is a duplicate of another transaction'

[sasa-tomic]

Description

icp network start fails every time with:

Seeding ICP and cycles account balances
Error: Failed to seed initial balances: Failed to transfer ICP: transaction is a duplicate of another transaction in block N

This happens even after a fully clean start (rm -rf .icp/cache). The network launcher successfully starts PocketIC with a gateway on port 8000, but icp-cli's seeding step fails because the ICP ledger's initial bootstrap state already contains the seed transactions. On failure, icp-cli kills the network, making it completely unusable.

Versions

• icp 0.2.0
• Network launcher: v12.0.0-2026-03-02-11-09.r1
• OS: Ubuntu Linux 6.17.0-14-generic

Steps to reproduce

rm -rf .icp/cache
icp network start -d

Fails on every attempt, regardless of whether state was cleaned. dfx start --clean --background works fine on the same machine.

Expected behavior

icp network start should handle the case where the PocketIC bootstrap state already includes seed balances and not attempt to re-seed, or seed with unique deduplication parameters.

[lwshang]

Adam traced the issue down to having multiple identities sharing the same principal. Could you check if that's the case on your end? If so, it should be fixed by #429.

[sasa-tomic]

I confirm that same principal was an issue locally, so #429 will most likely fully resolve the issue.

[raymondk]

This is fixed with release 0.2.1