An incident occurred on the Ethereum blockchain on May 11, interrupting the finalization of transactions for about thirty minutes. Although new blocks were offered on the Beacon chain, no transactions could be confirmed during this time interval.
Should we be worried about a widespread outage on Ethereum?
Finality helps ensure that crypto transactions cannot be reversed or undone after they have been executed, ensuring that transactions made on the blockchain will not be lost. Finality is used to measure how long it takes to gain reasonable assurance that transactions will not be reversed or modified. Blockchain protocols typically display the probabilistic finality of transactions, with transactions becoming “more and more final” over time as more blocks are confirmed.
The incident in question was detected between Ethereum epochs 200,552 to 200,554 when a sharp drop in attestations was observed. Fortunately, the situation was resolved without difficulty and one of the main developers of Ethereum, Preston Van Loonannounced on Twitter that finality had been restored.
In March, a similar issue had already been detected on the Goerli testnet before the rollout of the Shapella upgrade. The Shapella upgrade, which completed the network’s transition to a proof-of-stake protocol, was successfully deployed to mainnet on April 12.
Is decentralization the solution?
For the moment, the exact cause of this incident could not be determined but the Ethereum developers have assured that they are doing their best to solve the problem and ensure that other similar incidents do not happen again. ‘coming.
Superphiza pseudonymous Ethereum consultant, noted on Twitter that this anomaly illustrated again the usefulness of decentralization. He noted that “customer diversity” was one of the main reasons the impact of this issue was limited and the duration of the loss of finality was so brief. However, he also pointed out that the loss of finality could have been completely avoided if no client had more than 33% control over the validators.
Client diversity refers to the number of software clients available to network validators, and greater diversity means a more secure and robust network for validators. Superphiz also added that customer diversity is only one facet of applying decentralization. Two other important aspects are at the level of validators and block producers.
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