{"id":21877,"date":"2025-03-10T12:09:40","date_gmt":"2025-03-10T10:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/ethereum-developers-uncover-interference-in-pectra-deployment-on-sepolia\/"},"modified":"2025-03-10T12:09:40","modified_gmt":"2025-03-10T10:09:40","slug":"ethereum-developers-uncover-interference-in-pectra-deployment-on-sepolia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/ethereum-developers-uncover-interference-in-pectra-deployment-on-sepolia\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethereum Developers Uncover Interference in Pectra Deployment on Sepolia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/news\/ethereums-sepolia-testnet-faces-glitch-post-pectra-activation\">Issues<\/a> with the activation of the Pectra hard fork on March 5 in the Sepolia testnet were exacerbated by the actions of a malefactor, as reported by Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">I wrote up the story of the Pectra incident on Sepolia, its an interesting story about edge cases, coordination and an attacker who swooped in and made our lives much harder!<\/p>\n<p>Check it out (4min read): <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/0ezGnm0Z8j\">https:\/\/t.co\/0ezGnm0Z8j<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 MariusVanDerWijden (@vdWijden) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/vdWijden\/status\/1898665884236882428?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">March 9, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Following the <a href=\"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/news\/ethereum-developers-deploy-pectra-update-on-sepolia-testnet\">deployment of the update<\/a>, the Geth client team began reporting errors and mining empty blocks. The malfunction was caused by incorrect event generation by the deposit contract. A test transaction had been sent to it to check the withdrawal functionality.<\/p>\n<p>Developers created a patch and coordinated its deployment approximately three and a half hours later. However, the network soon began producing empty blocks again. Programmers discovered another problematic transaction that led to the same error.<\/p>\n<p>According to Van Der Wijden, they initially thought a trusted validator had made an error. However, it turned out the operation was conducted from a new, recently funded account.<\/p>\n<p>The developer noted that the attacker exploited an edge case they had overlooked. The ERC-20 standard allows anyone to make zero-value transfers to other addresses, even without tokens. The attacker triggered the malfunction again with such a transaction.<\/p>\n<p>The Ethereum team suspected the attacker was monitoring some of their chats and decided to proceed with the update discreetly.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>\u201cThe only way to stop the attack was to filter all transactions interacting with the deposit contract. So we made a private fix, which we deployed on several of our own nodes,\u201d Van Der Wijden explained.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>These nodes comprised about 10% of the network, allowing full blocks to be proposed again and the testnet to be used for further coordinated fixes.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>\u201cWe did not lose finality during the incident. As mentioned earlier, the issue arose only on Sepolia because we use a deposit contract with a token lock, unlike the mainnet,\u201d the developer added.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The team <a href=\"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/news\/ethereum-developers-consider-accelerating-network-upgrades\">scheduled<\/a> the activation of Pectra on the Ethereum mainnet for early April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Issues with the activation of the Pectra hard fork on March 5 in the Sepolia testnet were exacerbated by the actions of a malefactor, as reported by Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden. I wrote up the story of the Pectra incident on Sepolia, its an interesting story about edge cases, coordination and an attacker [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"select":"","news_style_id":"","cryptorium_level":"","_short_excerpt_text":"","creation_source":"","_metatest_mainpost_news_update":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[46,268,1617,1134],"class_list":["post-21877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-ethereum","tag-hardfork","tag-pectra","tag-technical-updates"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"views":"19","promo_type":"","layout_type":"","short_excerpt":"","is_update":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}