The Beacon Chain of Ethereum 2.0 underwent a seven-block deep reorg.
The Ethereum beacon chain experienced a 7-block deep reorg ~2.5h ago. This shows that the current attestation strategy of nodes should be reconsidered to hopefully result in a more stable chain! (proposals already exist) pic.twitter.com/BkQrKuUlw1
— Martin Köppelmann 🇺🇦 (@koeppelmann) May 25, 2022
Unfortunately, this demonstrates that the analysis by Georgios Konstantopoulos and Vitalik Buterin was too optimistic when in the article they claimed that reorganization stability would improve under Proof-of-Stake compared with Proof-of-Work. We have not seen a seven-block reorganization in Ethereum for many years, wrote Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann.
As a result of the incident on May 25, blocks #3,887,075 — #3,887,081 were reorganized.
According to Preston van Loon, the team suspects the fault arose from ‘non-trivial segmentation’ of the new and old client software.
We suspect this is caused by the implementation of Proposer Boost fork choice has not fully rolled out to the network. This reorg is not an indicator of a flawed fork choice, but a non-trivial segmentation of updated vs out of date client software.
— prestonvanloon.eth (@preston_vanloon) May 25, 2022
We suspect this is caused by the Proposer Boost fork not being fully implemented in the network,
— отметил он.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, named this ‘a good hypothesis’.
Another leading developer Terence Cao confirmed that the reorganization became possible due to different client software update timelines. By his count, about 75% of nodes had implemented Proposer Boost, and 25% had not.
“Such an incident had a 0.256 chance of occurring. So it’s a big coincidence,” the expert stressed.
That roughly gives ~75% boosted nodes and ~25% not boosted nodes in the network.
Such an incident needed 0.25^6 chances for it to happen. So it’s a big coincidence.— terence.eth (@terencechain) May 25, 2022
As reported, developers named August as the most likely time for Ethereum to move to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm.
In June, the Ropsten testnet will be migrated to it.