Ethereum Sees 25% Validation Drop Post-fusaka As Prysm Bug Nears...

A 25% dip in Ethereum’s voting participation coincided with a bug in the Prysm consensus client shortly after the Fusaka upgrade, with the network just 9% away from losing finality.

Shortly after the Fusaka network upgrade, the Ethereum network saw a sharp drop in validator participation after a bug in the Prysm consensus client knocked a chunk of votes offline.

According to a Thursday Prysm announcement, version v7.0.0 of the client unnecessarily generated old states while processing outdated attestations, a flaw that Prysm core developer Terence Tsao said prevented the nodes from functioning correctly. Developers recommended that users launch the client with the “--disable-last-epoch-targets” flag as a temporary workaround.

Beaconcha.in network data shows that at epoch 411,448, the network achieved only 75% sync participation (the percentage of 512 randomly selected nodes signing chain heads) and 74.7% voting participation. Voting participation being down 25% is under 9% shy of the network losing the two-thirds supermajority needed to maintain finality and regular operation.

At the time of writing, the current Ethereum network epoch (411,712) is experiencing nearly 99% voting participation and has reached 97% sync participation, indicating that the network has recovered. Prior to the issue, epochs routinely saw well over 99% of vote participation.

The decline in vote participation roughly matches the share of validators using the Prysm consensus client, estimated at 22.71% on Wednesday, before falling to 18% after the incident. This suggests that the attestation failure was likely concentrated among Prysm validators.

The Ethereum Foundation and Prysm developer organization Offchain Labs had not answered Cointelegraph’s request for comment by publication.

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If voting participation falls below two-thirds of the total staked Ether (ETH), the Ethereum network loses finality. Under Ethereum’s design, blocks can still be produced in that scenario, but the chain is no longer considered finalized.

As a likely consequence of such an outage, layer-2 bridges would freeze, rollups would pause withdrawals, and exchanges would increase their block confirmation requirements amid heightened risk of chain reorganization.

Source: CoinTelegraph