Ethereum, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency, suffered a second “finalization” delay on May 12. The Ethereum network suffered a technical issue that caused a delay of approximately one hour in “finalizing” transactions. The same issue recurred within 24 hours, raising concerns about the reliability and stability of the network. Moreover, it left the developers to scramble to find a solution. Here are the details…
There was a problem with the Ethereum network
Recently, the Ethereum network suffered a brief “transaction certainty” issue on the Beacon chain, causing heated debate among prominent members of the Ethereum community. “Transaction finality” refers to the confirmation and completion of an Ethereum transaction without the possibility of its reversal by the network. This term denotes the point at which a transaction is permanently written to the Blockchain and becomes irreversible.
Data sources on Ethereum network activity reported yesterday that validators encountered a problem confirming transactions during the transaction. According to data provided by Beaconcha.in, there was a significant decrease in the number of approvals received at epochs between 200,750 and 200,758 (a 30,000 block process). On the other hand, Terence.eth, a well-known Blockchain developer, stated on Twitter that the mainnet is again “not finalized,” meaning there is no “transaction certainty.” He broke the news by stating that Prysm, a client used to process transactions, has released a patch to fix the issue. Although later comments from Terence.eth suggested that the transactions have been finalized and other clients have also released patches, he warned that Ethereum was “not ready”, noting that the issue was not fully resolved.
This marks the second finalization delay for Ethereum in just 24 hours. As we reported as Kriptokoin.com, it could not complete the transactions for 25 minutes on May 11 for reasons that were unclear at the time. Terence.eth explained that the cause of the problem has been partially determined, revealing that Ethereum nodes running the Prysm client received problematic confirmations, which led to increased CPU and memory usage and ultimately led to a “death spiral.” He noted that most clients, with the exception of the Lighthouse client, are prone to similar issues.
Will there be a third outage?
Commenting on the delay on May 11, another developer, Superphiz, predicted that a third event could occur. He urged node operators to upgrade their hardware and switch to a minority client. While neither event resulted in a complete downtime of Ethereum, Blockchain continued to partially process transactions that were then settled properly.
These delays underscore the challenges faced by the Ethereum network as it tries to scale and process transactions quickly and efficiently. With the adoption and use of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on the ETH network increasing, it is crucial to ensure that the network can handle the increased traffic and transaction volume. Developers and node operators will continue to work to address the underlying issues causing these eventual delays, and Ethereum users will be monitoring the situation closely to see if any further incidents occur.
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