Ethereum developers have taken steps to address finality issues that occurred on the Beacon chain last week. On May 11 and 12, the Beacon chain, the consensus layer of the Ethereum network, failed to reach finality twice. The first occurrence lasted 25 minutes and the second over an hour.
Although the exact cause of such an incident is still unknown, it is worth noting that this network failure had no impact on on-chain activity and transactions were still processed.
Ethereum Developers Deploy Network Patches to Meet Finality Challenge
In response to last week, Ethereum developers released patches to provide a fix for network users.
according to a cheep Per Beacom Chain Community Health Analyst superphiz, Teku and Prysm, two of Ethereum’s constitutional clients, have implemented these fixes, which will help prevent further finality issues on the Beacon chain.
We can start to move past this problem of loss of purpose, @Teku_ConsenSys and @prylabs have implemented fixes that will prevent the attestation flood. This is a step in our diversity and decentralization journey, let’s learn from it and move forward with a greater purpose. pic.twitter.com/cSRgPTWeuy
— superphiz.eth 🦇🔊🛡️ (@superphiz) May 13, 2023
Superphiz also shared a statement from the Ethereum Foundation in which they speculate that the cause of these “exceptional scenarios” is the “high load of some Consensus Layer clients.”
The Ethereum Foundation applauded the customer diversity that made it feasible for transactions to take place on the network, as not all customer implementations were affected by finality challenges.
The Ethereum Foundation also confirmed that the exact cause of the Beacon chain failure is still unknown. However, they ensured that the updates implemented by Teku and Prsym would help prevent future occurrences through optimizations that will prevent beacon nodes from using a lot of resources during these situations.
The total supply of ETH decreases after the merger
In other news, the total supply of Ethereum declined in the months after The Merge.
On September 15, 2022, The Merge occurred in which the Ethereum network made a full transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), leading to Ethereum 2.0.
In the 241 days after this historic event, data from Ethereum’s supply analytics platform, ultrasound.money shows that the total supply of ETH has decreased by 0.29%.
Source: ultrasound.money
Since The Merge, over 653,000 ETH has been burned compared to 425,000 ETH minted in the last eight months, resulting in a net negative change of around -227,000 ETH.
Interestingly, ultrasound.money predicts that the total supply of ETH would have increased at a rate of 3.244% per year had the Merger not occurred.
That being said, if this deflationary trend continues, it would mean good news for ETH investors in the long run. This is because a decrease in supply usually results in an increase in value.
At the time of writing this article, ETH is trade to $1,805.77 with a total offer of 122.89 million. Along with most of the market, ETH showed a negative price movement in the last week, losing 5.36% of its value.
ETH Trading At $1804.73 | Source: ETHUSD Chart on Tradingview.com
Featured Image: Forbes, TradingView Chart
