Ethereum’s Beacon Chain Experiences Finality Issues
Ethereum core developers recently released patches for Prysm Labs and Teku clients in response to two Beacon Chain finality issues that occurred within 24 hours. The Beacon Chain serves as the consensus layer for the Ethereum network, and these issues prevented block finalization. Here’s a closer look at what happened and how it was resolved:
The Finality Issues
On May 11, Ethereum developers reported that the Beacon Chain was experiencing problems confirming transactions. Although new blocks could be proposed, an unknown issue prevented their finalization. The outage lasted around 25 minutes. A similar issue occurred on May 12, preventing block finalization for over an hour.
The Ethereum Foundation stated that finality was unable to be reached for three and eight epochs. According to the Foundation’s statement, the issue “appears to have been caused by high load on some of the Consensus Layers clients, which in turn was caused by an exceptional scenario.”
Client Diversity and Upgrades
Although the network was unable to finalize, live and end users were still able to transact on the network thanks to client diversity. Not all client implementations were affected by this issue. Client diversity refers to the number of software clients available to network validators. Greater diversity among clients means a more robust and secure network.
In response to the finality issues, Teku and Prysm have released upgrades that implement optimizations to prevent beacon nodes from consuming excessive resources.
Previous Issues and Upgrades
This isn’t the first time that the Beacon Chain has experienced issues. A similar issue occurred on March 15, delaying the Goerli testnet version of Ethereum’s “Shapella” upgrade. However, the upgrade was successfully deployed on April 12. Ethereum’s preexisting proof-of-work chain merged with the Beacon Chain on September 15, 2022, enabling the network’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, which is faster and less energy-intensive.
Increased Activity and Staking Rewards
Recent trading hype around memecoins has increased Ethereum’s activity and staking rewards rates. According to on-chain data, validators earned $46 million in the first week of May, or 24,997 Ether (ETH), a 40% increase over the previous week’s income of $33 million, when 18,339 ETH were distributed as rewards.
Conclusion
Ethereum’s recent finality issues were caused by high load on some of the Consensus Layers clients, but client diversity allowed users to continue transacting on the network. Upgrades have been released to prevent similar issues from happening in the future, and increased activity and staking rewards show the growing interest in the Ethereum network.
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