U.Today - Yesterday, Ethereum (ETH), the second largest blockchain and the main smart contract platform, went through two incidents with block finality. It recovered promptly, and the network was online during the whole period of issues, developers say.
Ethereum (ETH) lost finality but did not go offline, Polygon CISO stresses
Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem veteran Mudit Gupta, chief information security officer at Polygon Labs and partner in DeltaBC Fund highlighted that the network faced no outage: Even during the time of "finality issues," some blocks were added to the network properly. However, almost 70% of blocks were rejected, so thousands of Ethereum (ETH) transactions failed.
As the network stayed online, no hard fork or chain split occurred. The actual roots of the problem are yet to be revealed by the researchers. By press time, the majority of them describe the incidents as "denial of service" caused by heavy load on the network.
Gupta suggested that it could be a malicious actor who increased pressure on the network, causing the series of "finality issues."
By printing time, Ethereum (ETH) is back to normal, only one block has been "skipped" in the last 60 minutes.
Secret sauce of Ethereum (ETH) sustainability
Today, on May 13, 2023, several Ethereum (ETH) client teams released hotfixes, i.e., emergency code updates. Namely, Offchain Labs' Prysm and Teku software was released in the past hours.
Ethereum (ETH) educationist David Hoffmann, host of Bankless podcast, is that the diversity of clients is what helps Ethereum (ETH) go through such accidents:
He also stressed that "single-client" blockchain systems are fragile and weak.