Ethereum Beacon Chain experiences 7 block reorg: What's going on?

Ahead of the Merge tentatively penciled successful for August, Ethereum’s Beacon Chain experienced a seven-block reorganization (reorg) yesterday.

According to information from Beacon Scan, connected May 25 7 blocks from fig 3,887,075 to 3,887,081 were knocked retired of the Beacon Chain betwixt 08:55:23 to 08:56:35 AM UTC.

The word reorg refers to an lawsuit successful which a artifact that was portion of the canonical chain, specified arsenic the Beacon Chain, gets knocked disconnected the concatenation owed to a competing artifact beating it out.

It tin beryllium the effect of a malicious onslaught from a miner with precocious resources oregon a bug. Such incidents spot the concatenation unintentionally fork oregon duplicate.

On this occasion, developers judge that the contented is owed to condition alternatively than thing superior specified arsenic a information contented oregon cardinal flaw, with a “proposer boost fork” being highlighted successful particular. This word refers to a method successful which circumstantial proposers are fixed precedence for selecting the adjacent artifact successful the blockchain.

Core Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon suggested the reorg was owed to a “non-trivial segmentation” of caller and aged lawsuit node software, and was not needfully thing malicious. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin labeling the mentation a “good hypothesis.”

Block reorg: Beacon Scan

Martin Köppelmann, the co-founder of EVM compatible Gnosis concatenation was 1 of the archetypal to item the occurrence via Twitter yesterday morning, noting that it “shows that the existent attestation strategy of nodes should beryllium reconsidered to hopefully effect successful a much unchangeable chain! (proposals already exist).”

In effect to Köppelmann, Van Loon tentatively attributed the reorg to the proposer boost fork which hadn’t afloat been implemented yet:

“We fishy this is caused by the implementation of Proposer Boost fork prime has not afloat rolled retired to the network. This reorg is not an indicator of a flawed fork choice, but a non-trivial segmentation of updated vs retired of day lawsuit software.”

“All of the details volition beryllium made nationalist erstwhile we person a precocious grade of assurance regarding the basal cause. Expect a post-mortem from the lawsuit improvement community!” helium added.

We fishy this is caused by the implementation of Proposer Boost fork prime has not afloat rolled retired to the network. This reorg is not an indicator of a flawed fork choice, but a non-trivial segmentation of updated vs retired of day lawsuit software.

— prestonvanloon.eth (@preston_vanloon) May 25, 2022

Earlier today, different developer Terence Tsao echoed this proposal to his 11,900 Twitter followers, noting that the reorg seemed to beryllium caused by “boosted vs. non boosted nodes successful the web and the timing of a truly precocious arriving block.”

“Given that the proposer boost is simply a non-consensus-breaking change. With the asynchronicity of the lawsuit merchandise schedule, the roll-out happened gradually. Not each nodes updated the proposer boost simultaneously.”

Related: OpenEthereum enactment ends with the Merge accelerated approaching

Van Loon spoke astatine the Permissionless league past week and said that the Merge and power to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) could travel successful August “if everything goes to plan.”

While the reorg is definite to rise questions of this imaginable timeline, Van Loon and the different developers person not yet outlined whether it volition person immoderate interaction astatine all.