The core developers of Ethereum have rolled out multiple patches for Teku and Prysm Labs clients as a response to two finality issues in Beacon Chain in 24 hours. The Chain serves as the consensus layer for the entirety of the Ethereum network.
On the 11th of May, the developers of Ethereum reported that the Chain was experiencing problems in confirming transactions. Although multiple new blocks have been proposed, there are certain unknown issues that have prevented the finalization. The outage lasted around 25 minutes, and a pretty similar issue occurred on 12th May, which prevented block finalization for over an hour.
Beacon Chain Has Been Merged With Ethereum’s Proof-Of-Chain
Finality was not really able to reach three and eight epochs, as mentioned by the Ethereum Foundation, in a statement that was shared by an Ethereum consultant on Twitter. The issue seems to have been caused by a high load on some of the clients of Consensus Layers, which was also caused by an exceptional scenario.
Although the network was not capable of finalizing live and end users were capable of transacting on the network due to client diversity- as not all the client implementations were affected by the problem- which was finally fixed by the Beacon Chain. Client diversity, for those who are unaware, relates to the number of software clients which are available to network validators.
A similar issue occurring on 15th March delayed the Goerli testnet version of Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade, which was successfully deployed on 12th April. The preexisting proof-of-work chain for Ethereum merged with the Beacon Chain on 15th September 2022.
