The Ethereum network has suffered a chain split as some validators were running operations on the earlier versions of the Ethereum network. The Geth client disconnected from the main network.
This occurrence of the incident when the validators hacked down refused to update their software to suppress the impact of a network error. Chain splitting has been identified to affect roughly 54% of the network, as the Geth client hosts up to 75% of all Ethereum nodes, with roughly 73% running at the time of fork.
According to a tweet from Ethereum Foundation security leader Martin Swende, the bug specifically affected v1.10.1 and earlier versions of Geth clients.
“A consensus bug hit the #ethereum mainnet today, exploiting the consensus bug that was fixed in Geth v1.10.8… Fortunately, most of the miners were already up to date, and the correct string is also the longest (canon ), “in a follow-up tweet, Sweden said” It was a very close shave. An issue affecting more than 50% of Ethereum clients leads to a fork. “
The Ethereum network is known to always suffer chain splitting due to a bug in the Geth client. A similar event was observed in November 2020 and a different approach was taken to resolve the error behind the scenes.
Back then, the developers were blamed for the split, as many believe that a closer equipment upgrade would have pushed the upgrade of most miners and prevented the breakdown.
This time, the bug was first pointed out a few days ago, and update requests were not immediately honored by miners. However, most of the mining pools, including Flexpool, BTC.com, and Binance, were notified and swift action was taken.
While thought leaders in the Ethereum ecosystem have advocated for a temporary cooldown in Geth client transactions, the threat under chain splitting will be easily resolved when most validators update their software to version corrected.
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