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The Ethereum developers took action to address the finality issues that arose on the Beacon network last week. On May 11 and 12, the Beacon chain, the consensus layer of the Ethereum network, failed to achieve finality twice. The first incident lasted 25 minutes, the second more than an hour.
Although the exact cause of such an incident is still unknown, it is worth noting that this network failure did not affect the activity on the network, and transactions were still being processed.
Ethereum developers release network patches to fix Finality problem
In response to the past week, Ethereum developers have released patches to provide a solution for network users.
According to a post by Beacom Chain community analyst superphiz, Teku and Prysm, two Ethereum constitutional clients, have implemented these fixes that will help prevent further finality issues on the Beacon chain.
We can start putting this loss of finality issue behind us, @Teku_ConsenSys and @prylabs have deployed fixes that will prevent the attestation flooding. This is one step on our diversity & decentralization journey, let’s learn from it and move forward with greater purpose. pic.twitter.com/cSRgPTWeuy
— superphiz.eth 🦇🔊🛡️ (@superphiz) May 13, 2023
Superphiz also shared a statement from the Ethereum Foundation in which they suggest that the reason for these “exceptional scenarios” is “high load on some Consensus Layer clients.”
The Ethereum Foundation welcomed the diversity of clients that made transactions possible on the network, as not all client implementations were affected by finality issues.
The Ethereum Foundation also confirmed that the exact cause of the Beacon chain failure is still unknown. However, they assured that the updates implemented by Teku and Prsym will help avoid such situations in the future through optimizations that will prevent beacons from overusing resources in such situations.
Total ETH Supply Drops After Merger
In other news, it should be noted that the total supply of Ethereum has decreased in the months following the merger.
On September 15, 2022, a merger took place during which the Ethereum network completely switched from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), resulting in Ethereum 2.0.
241 days after this historic event, data from the Ethereum supply analytics platform, Ultrasound. money shows that the total supply of Ethereum has decreased by 0.29%.
Source: Ultrasound. money
More than 653,000 ETH have been burned since the merger 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 increase at a rate of 3.244% per year if the merger had not taken place.
However, if this deflationary trend continues, it will be good news for long-term investors in ETH. This is due to the fact that a decrease in supply usually leads to an increase in cost.
At the time of writing, ETH is trading at $1,805.77 with a total supply of 122.89 million. Along with most of the market, ETH showed negative price movement last week, shedding 5.36% of its value.
ETH is trading at $1804.73 | Source: ETHUSD Chart on Tradingview.com