At approximately 8:15 pm UTC on May 11, several Ethereum core developers declared that the Beacon Chain was struggling to verify transactions. Though new blocks were able to be proposed, an unidentified issue hindered them from being officially concluded.
On March 15th, the Goerli test net was met with unexpected delays of Ethereum’s “Shapella” upgrade due to low validator participation rates. However, by April 12th, this same upgrade had been successfully deployed on the main net.
In 2020, Ethereum launched its Beacon Chain – an original proof-of-stake blockchain. Three years later, on Sept. 15, 2022, this chain was united with Ethereum’s existing proof-of-work chain in order to prosperously complete a transition to a more efficient and environmentally friendly consensus mechanism based on proof-of-stake.
Nearly a half-hour had passed before finality was restored to the main net, with Ethereum core developer and Prysmatic Labs partner Preston Van Loon proudly declaring that the process had been completed.
A recent analysis by Beaconcha.in exposed a remarkable decrease in attestations over Ethereum epochs 200,552 to 200,554. A single epoch constitutes a period of 32 slots; usually lasting around six minutes and 24 seconds – during which validators propose and attest for blocks.
Analyses of what caused this problem are still ongoing, and Ethereum developers have reported that they are taking steps to ensure it does not happen again. Furthermore, Superphiz, an anonymous Ethereum expert, proposed that a diverse distribution of clients might have helped mitigate any damage from this loss of finality. He did add as well though that no single client should ever have more than 33% control in order to prevent such occurrences from occurring at all.
Network security and robustness can be maintained through the diversification of software clients that are available to validators. Increasing the diversity of these clients will help ensure that validation is done correctly on the network.
