The beacon chain from Ethereum suddenly stopped validating blocks overnight, around midnight French time. While this interruption did not alter the fundamental functioning of the main chain, the event did take the community by surprise and caused a wind of concern to blow through the network of the second largest cryptocurrency in the world.
Ethereum, the Node of the Problem (or Node Problem)
Let’s immediately remove any ambiguity: no, Ethereum has not “stopped” and, as far as we know, the critical architecture of the blockchain has not experienced any major malfunction.
The crux of the problem seems to have tightened between epochs 200,552 and 200,554 of the Ethereum beacon chain, on what is called the Consensus Layerterritory of the network on which evolve the operators of nodes which validate the transactions.
For a few tens of minutes, time is like suspended on the Ethereum network, the nodes no longer processing transactions, without a specific cause being able to explain this situation, at the time of writing these lines.
The Ethereum development team quickly indicated that they were working on the possible origins of this sudden outage.
First elements provided by certain observers, a recurring concern related to the lack of diversity of node operators might not be unrelated to the problem.
The cybersecurity specialist and consultant for the Beacon Chain Superphiz took the opportunity to emphasize that this type of failure could be largely avoided if no actor in the network (or group of actors) held control of more than 33% of the nodes, while calling for “more diversity”.
While waiting for further explanations, we will remember that Ethereum has never really malfunctioned, only its consensus mechanism seizing up for a few tens of minutes. A new opportunity to continue working on the resilience of the network whose user fees are once again pointed out, thanks to the PEPE Season.
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