The Ethereum Beacon Chain experienced a temporary outage upon completion on Thursday, May 11.
The incident took place around 4 p.m. ET, as confirmed by tweets from superphiz.eth, a pseudonymous individual.
An unknown cause for the interruption.
Temporary interruption in the block completion process, or “non-completion,” refers to the condition where blocks on the Ethereum blockchain were not validated or added to the blockchain in the normal manner.
This outage could affect the confirmation and settlement of transactions on the Ethereum network until the issue is resolved and the completion process resumes.
In contrast to claims on Twitter that the beacon chain has “stopped”, it is important to clarify that such information is misleading.
Actually, the completion process experienced a delay of approximately 19 minutes.
Unfortunately, the exact cause of this outage is currently unknown. However, the design of the Ethereum proof-of-stake blockchain incorporates resiliency mechanisms to address such situations.
Prysmatic Labs co-founder Preston van Loon also informed the public that the developers were “investigating current mainnet issues… We’ll post an update once we learn something.”
About an hour later, at 5:40 PM, the developer wrote:
Finality has been restored. We don’t know the root cause yet, but something happened that caused several client implementations to work very hard to keep up with the chain.
smooth operation
These incidents come amid ongoing discussions among Ethereum developers regarding block validity criteria and an upcoming fork called “Dencun.”
The planned upgrade is anticipated, incorporating Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844, or “proto-danksharding.”
The importance of EIP-4844 lies in its potential to address a major challenge facing Ethereum: scalability.
As the popularity of Ethereum grows and the demand for decentralized applications (dapps) increases, scalability becomes crucial to ensure a smooth and efficient user experience.
By introducing sharding via EIP-4844, Ethereum aims to significantly improve its ability to handle a higher volume of transactions, improve network performance, and minimize the amount of outages that may occur in the future.
