Ethereum network hit by a second finalization bug

The Ethereum blockchain experienced a second transaction finalization problem in the space of 24 hours, which occurred on Friday.

Indeed, Ethereum has experienced several major failures in recent days after undergoing several significant updates. Yesterday again, the Ethereum blockchain failed to “finalize” blocks for a period of about 1 hour. This is the second problem with finalization on the network this week. On Thursday evening, the mainnet had already stopped finalizing transactions for about 30 minutes.

This is a second “leak of inactivity” type incident before returning to normal. It is crucial to clarify that the Ethereum blockchain has not been stopped and that it is in no way a problem of centralization. For users, these incidents went unnoticed and transactions continued to be carried out, despite the need to resolve these problems.

For the record, Ethereum transactions are considered “finalized” when they are included in a block that cannot be modified without one third of all ETH placed in staking being burned.

While ETH developers have yet to communicate much about the situation, ETH researcher Danny Ryan said that many CL clients have experienced high load due to an “exceptional scenario.“

While the instability of the network has some participants and investors concerned, Preston Van Loon, the co-founder of Prysmatic, said Ethereum did not go down. “You could have been transacting during the epochs that were struggling to finalize, there was a lot of block space when the blocks were produced,” he explained.

This Saturday morning, Prysm announced a fix aimed at dealing with turbulent times. “It is strongly recommended to upgrade if your node is subject to heavy use,” the client software said.