Yesterday, Ethereum (ETH) faced an incident where it lost block finality for a short period of time. This was caused by a 'degraded performance' due to high load on the network and not an 'outage'. While this issue caused some transactions to fail, the majority of blocks were accepted by the network with no disruption to its normal functioning. The issue was resolved quickly and hotfixes from developers such as Offchain Labs' Prysm and Teku software were released to avoid any future incidents.
The potential malicious actor responsible for this high load has yet to be identified and some validators will be slashed (penalized) as a consequence. David Hoffmann, host of Bankless podcast, is sure that this incident highlights just how important it is for Ethereum (ETH) to have multiple components, none of which are individually critical, as opposed to single-client blockchain systems which are far more weak and fragile.
Andrew Watson
- 2023-05-13
Understanding the Ethereum (ETH) Block Finality Incident and the Hotfixes
Ethereum (ETH) recently faced an incident with block finality, due to high load on the network. This incident was resolved with the release of certain hotfixes. David Hoffmann believes this highlights how important it is for Ethereum to have multiple components, preventing it from being vulnerable and fragile.
![CandleFocus Ethereum-ETH-BlockFinality-Hotfixes-HighLoad-Incident](https://images.candlefocus.com/Understanding-the-Ethereum-(ETH)-Block-Finality-Incident-and-the-Hotfixes.jpg)