On the evening of May 11th, Ethereum developers announced that they had resolved an issue and were investigating the root cause of the problem. Several Ethereum developers reported that the Beacon chain, a branch of the Ethereum blockchain that uses the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, had paused transactions and they were investigating the issue.
The beacon chain stopped finalizing about thirty minutes ago. I don’t know why yet, but in general the chain is designed to be resilient against this, transactions will continue as usual and finalization will kick in when the problem is resolved. pic.twitter.com/utAS0uAWpG
— superphiz.eth 🦇🔊🛡️ (@superphiz) May 11, 2023
However, after about 25 minutes, the mainnet network completed transaction blocks again. Developers stated that they are continuing to investigate the cause and will inform the community as soon as possible. While some blocks were delayed, transactions continued to be processed normally.
To explain the issue, community members pointed out the diversity of clients. This means that there are many types of software clients that validators can use. This is why the issue did not spread further or last longer.
In addition, the Twitter account @EthereumPools.info discovered that “in a few epochs, most of the groups/admins they follow are offline.” Data sources on Ethereum network activity show that this issue has occurred with validators. Validators propose proofs when the network processes transactions.
🚨 For a couple of epochs almost every pool/operator that we monitor went offline 🧐
Any idea what happened? pic.twitter.com/3Q9BDFis1d
— ethereumpools.info (@EthereumPools) May 11, 2023
According to Beaconcha.in, Ethereum epochs from 200,552 to 200,554 recorded a significant decrease in the number of proofs received. The first epoch encountered a problem at 20:13 on May 11th. The issue was resolved about half an hour later.
The Ethereum community is closely following the investigation of this incident. Ethereum is a leading cryptocurrency that is often used for transactions, so any issues with the network are of great concern to its users. Developers will continue to monitor the network and work to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.
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