In the words of Ethereum Core developer Preston Van Loon, “Finality has been restored. We do not know the root cause yet, but something happened to cause several client implementations to work really hard to keep up with the chain.”
The Ethereum (ETH) mainnet recovered from an issue that caused the network’s beacon chain to halt the finalization of new transactions for thirty minutes.
Around 4 PM ET, developer Superphiz informed the community that although the Ethereum mainnet was able to propose new transactions, it had stopped finalizing new blocks after epoch 200,552. However, the issue was resolved within half an hour as the Ethereum network began confirming new transactions.
The cause of the block finalization incident has yet to be identified, with Superphiz noting that the issue occurred even though Ethereum’s beacon chain was designed to be resilient to bugs that can halt finalization of transactions.
Soon, an on-chain investigation revealed that several validators, including those operating under Coinbase, went offline during the incident. This has led developers to speculate that some unknown bug caused a drastic decline in validator participation.
Meanwhile, many community members praised Ethereum for its client diversity. According to them, the incident was short-lived due to the variation in the software clients used by Ethereum validators.
It is worth noting that a similar issue occurred on the Goerli testnet ahead of the release of Ethereum’s Shanghai update. Back then, the delay in block finalization occurred because many validators failed to update their client software to keep up with the changes.
Written by
Ayush Pande
Ayush Pande is a hardware, gaming, and crypto writer based in India. He's a tech enthusiast who's fascinated by the potential of blockchain technology.
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