Ethereum 2.0 testnet developers fix bug that caused a chain split

Developers at Prysmatic Labs fixed a critical bug in the Medalla testnet client of Ethereum 2.0 that prevented normal network operation.

💎New release alpha.22 is up 💎

Thread ⬇️https://t.co/Jxt7XqBUEV

— Prysmatic Labs (@prylabs) August 16, 2020

The issue was discovered on Friday, August 14. In the Cloudflare external service used by the Prysm client, internal time shifted by about four hours. This affected validators, who started producing blocks earlier than the allotted time, 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 difference.

Against the backdrop of the problem, the share of validators earning rewards from staking test ETH collapsed from 75% to 5%, and then to zero. Last week their number reached 26 000, and node operators had staked more than 1 million ETH in total.

Subsequently the developers released a patch that fixes the synchronization issue. They urged validators to update their nodes and participate in restoring the testnet.

We need all the help we can get to get the testnet back on track and updating your nodes is a great way to add more healthy peers to the network. Once there’s good amount of healthy nodes, it should be a matter of time before validators can increase the participation rate 📈

— Prysmatic Labs (@prylabs) August 16, 2020

Van Lun, co-founder of Prysmatic Labs, noted that identifying and fixing such vulnerabilities at the testing stage plays an important role in the future success of Ethereum 2.0’s mainnet.

Earlier Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that Ethereum 2.0 proved more technically complex than expected.

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