The Ethereum 2.0 Medalla final testnet outage will not affect the timeline for launching Phase 0 of the protocol on the mainnet. Prysmatic Labs editor Raul Jordan said this in the blog.
On August 14 the issue emerged in Medalla. In Prysm’s third-party service Cloudflare, the internal time shifted by about four hours. This affected validators, who began producing blocks earlier than the allotted slot, and could no longer collect rewards. As a result the test blockchain split into four chains that could not interact adequately with each other due to the time differences.
On August 17, Prysmatic Labs fixed a critical bug in the Medalla client that made normal network operation impossible.
“This became a real bloodbath. More than 3,000 validator exits in a short period. We did not properly configure local protection against ‘isolation’,” explained Jordan.
Competitors, notably from Bitcoin SV, reacted to the Medalla testnet outage in CoinGeek’s blog. They said the events of August 14 indicate Ethereum 2.0 is not ready for launch and pose new delays. In their view, this could pose a serious challenge for developers amid problems on the current network.
Just imagine a bug like this bringing down mainnet. ETH 2.0 is going to need all the testing it can get. Maybe a couple of Hail Mary’s too. 18 months TM. https://t.co/6e1oQ7uVYu
— Eli Afram (@justicemate) August 20, 2020
Jordan noted that for the Ethereum team the Medalla outage was a good lesson “to prevent such a situation on the mainnet.” He warned that similar problems on the mainnet, where cryptocurrency trades for real money, would be catastrophic.
The Prysmatic Labs editor noted that the time-synchronisation system of nodes via a server initially seemed a good solution. It later turned out to be a single point of failure that brought down the whole network. The team concluded and will now rely solely on system time.
Jordan rejected the idea that the Medalla testnet had “died.” At the time of writing, validator participation rose from 0-5% to 40%. For finalisation, the share must exceed 66%.
“We believe that the expected goal of launching the genesis block on the mainnet two to three months after Medalla remains an ideal target. We will publish a public list of requirements for ETH2 operation. The Medalla incident will certainly add new items to the list concerning the stability and security of the client,” Jordan clarified.
As reported in April, Kosala Hemachandra, the creator of the MyEtherWallet (MEW) wallet, predicted that the full-scale version of Ethereum 2.0 would not arrive before 2022. He is confident that the Phase 0 launch will take place by the end of this year.
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