After a second crash encountered in block validation on Friday night, an update has been rolled out to two pieces of Ethereum’s consensus layer software. It should be noted that on the side of the users of the blockchain, they were able to continue to carry out their transactions without interruption.
Ethereum faces further delays in validating its blocks
Friday night, the Ethereum blockchain suffered a second incident type “inactivity leak” before returning to normal. The problem is the same as the one encountered the day before and which we explained in more detail, namely blocks not finalizing.
Before going further, it is important to emphasize two points which may have been misunderstood by part of the community:
- The Ethereum blockchain has not stopped;
- This has nothing to do with any centralization problem.
From the point of view of the users themselves, these incidents actually went completely unnoticed and the transactions continued to be operatedalthough it is indeed important to fix the problems encountered.
If details are still to be provided soon, it seems that the source of the problem is on the side of the software used to operate the consensus layer.
While writing these lines, the Prysm and Teku customer teams had thus released a patch which should fix all of this.
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More details on the causes of this inactivity leak
Although the reason for this inactivity leak is a bit technical, let’s try to explain it simply. Prior to the patches, validators would have received attestations for epochs prior to the current epoch.
On Ethereum, an epoch corresponds to 32 blocks. These certificates would thus have come to interfere with the work of the validatorsthen generating the attestations for the current epoch, thus forcing the client to calculate the validity of several attestations at the same time.
In the long run, this phenomenon would have full cache of validator clientsas when you open several programs simultaneously on a computer and the latter experiences a slowdown while loading everything.
In a way, the fixes made on the Prysm and Teku clients therefore add a filter, so that validators ignore superfluous attestations to focus on the ones that really matter to network security.
Furthermore, network operators are advised not to be satisfied with the minimum technical configuration to run their validation node, so as to be able to withstand sudden peaks of activity.
It will therefore be a question of observing whether its patches are sufficient to guarantee the stability of the clients of the consensus layer. However, we can also point out that Ethereum is built to be resilient to such issues.
While it’s best that said issues don’t arise, a module called Gasper is able to activate to act as a “spare wheel” in the event of a leak from prolonged inactivity, allowing the blockchain to continue functioning. .
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Sources: Gasper Operation, Prysm Client Patch
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I timidly discovered the world of blockchain at the end of 2018 during my quest for financial freedom. Initially invested moderately, it was only two years later that I took the gamble of betting everything on the movement that was taking shape then. I then dedicate 2021 to training myself better to acquire more knowledge and seriousness. As I often like to say: I still have a billion things to learn. And what I do know, I want to share with you.
Vincent Mayor
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