The Beacon Chain, which serves as the consensus layer for the Ethereum network, experienced technical problems on two separate occasions in the past week, causing it to stop completing blocks. While blocks were proposed, they were not validated during a 25-minute window.
The two incidents were recorded on May 11 and 12 when more than 60% of the validators stopped performing their duties, resulting in a loss of Finality.
loss in purpose
According to Glassnode, “Purpose” essentially it means to the state where a large majority of validators, two-thirds of the total share, have attested to the final state of the blockchain, ensuring that a block and its processed transactions cannot be modified or removed from the blockchain.
Beacon chain performance degraded last week as nearly 60% of validators were offline and absent to carry out their consensus responsibilities. The analytics firm noted that around 3.68% of daily slots were lost and 253 blocks were not proposed on time. This is still substantially lower than the 658 blocks lost in the Shapella update.
Glassnode further observed that some consensus layer clients encountered older attestations and were forced to upload older states for verification while trying to handle new incoming ones simultaneously. This subsequently caused these systems to “overheat and malfunction”.
Not all customers were affected due to a difference in design approach. As a result, the validators that ran them were able to process transactions and produce blocks.
However, the affected validators in both cases were back online within 20 minutes and one hour, respectively. The participation rate quickly climbed back to over 98%.
During the two losses in Finality, no end users on the Ethereum mainnet were affected and were able to transact on the network due to the diversity of customers. But, the second one resulted in the first idle leak, which is a state of emergency used to recover Finality on the Beacon Chain. In such a case, inactive validators are penalized until they dilute off-chain or start participating.
On a more technical level, some consensus layer clients encountered older certifications and were forced to upload older statuses for verification, while also trying to handle new incoming certifications, eventually causing these systems to overheat and crash. evil… pic.twitter.com/qST8kvUkOc
– glass node (@glassnode) May 14, 2023
Aftermath
In response to the issue, the Ethereum core developers released patches for Prysm Labs and Teku clients. in a statementAn Ethereum consultant said that the issue with Finality “appears to have been caused by high load on some of the Consensus Layers clients, which in turn was caused by an exceptional scenario.”
The two clients have released updates that implement optimizations to prevent beacon nodes from consuming excessive resources.
The finality issues follow increased activity and staking reward rates on Ethereum due to a memecoin revival that triggered a massive jump in gas consumption on the network, with fees hitting a 12-month high.
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