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Ethereum core developers have released patches to Prysm Labs and Teku clients in response to two issues with Beacon Chain finality within 24 hours. The Beacon Chain serves as the consensus layer for the Ethereum network.
On May 11, Ethereum developers reported that Beacon Chain was having problems confirming transactions. While new blocks could be proposed, an unknown issue prevented their completion. The outage lasted about 25 minutes. A similar issue occurred on May 12th, preventing the lockdown from completing for over an hour.
Finality could not be reached for epochs 3 and 8, according to an Ethereum Foundation statement posted by an Ethereum advisor on Twitter. The issue “appears to have been caused by high load on some Consensus Layers clients, which in turn was caused by an exceptional scenario.”
The beacon chain stopped finalizing about thirty minutes ago. I don’t know why yet, but in general the chain is designed to be resilient against this, transactions will continue as usual and finalization will kick in when the problem is resolved. pic.twitter.com/utAS0uAWpG
— superphiz.eth ️ (@superphiz) May 11, 2023
Although the network failed to complete, live and end users were able to transact on the network due to the diversity of clients, “because not all client implementations were affected by this exceptional scenario.”
The variety of clients is related to the number of software clients available to network validators. Greater diversity among clients means a more reliable and secure network.
Both Teky and Prysm have released updates that implement optimizations to prevent Beacon Nodes from over-consuming resources.
A similar issue occurred on March 15, which delayed the Goerli version of the Ethereum “Shapella” upgrade testnet, which was successfully deployed on April 12. The pre-existing Ethereum proof-of-stake chain merged with the Beacon chain on September..15, 2022, allowing the network to transition to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism that is faster and less energy-intensive.
The recent trading frenzy around Memecoin has increased Ethereum activity and staking reward levels. Validators earned $46 million in the first week of May, or 24,997 Ether, up 40% from the previous week of $33 million, when 18,339 Ether were distributed as rewards, according to in-network data.
