On Friday, a technical glitch halted the Ethereum network from finalizing blocks, making it the second-largest blockchain in the world by cryptocurrency market cap. Concerns were raised on May 12, 2023, as the Ethereum network experienced technical difficulties related to block finality for more than an hour. The network employs a process to guarantee crypto-economic security, according to sources.
According to the Ethereum Foundation, the process of finality takes approximately 15 minutes. This process ensures that a block on the blockchain cannot be modified or deleted without burning at least 33% of the total staked ETH.
In a recent development, the ETH experienced a loss of finality for approximately an hour during midday on Friday. This marks the second occurrence of such an issue within 24 hours. During a 25-minute window on Thursday, there were reports of proposed blocks that were not validated. Further details regarding the incident are yet to be disclosed.
The recent outages in the crypto world have left many wondering about the cause behind them. The lack of clarity regarding the issue has prompted several crypto community members to take to social media to discuss and analyze the situation to identify the root cause of the problem.
In a recent tweet, Adam Cochran stated about fixing the issue:
1/2
— Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) May 12, 2023
Eth beacon chain finality has now failed for over an hour, we’re at inactivity leak time and there is no denying this is now a liveness fault.
Hoping that this is just an implementation issue for a single client to fix and not a larger protocol issue… either way not good https://t.co/b8EBi972NJ
According to tweets by Ethereum core engineer Eric Conner, the network “did not go down,” Rather, there was a fault in select clients that has since been rectified.
Ethereum chain is finalizing again.
— eric.eth (@econoar) May 12, 2023
And NO, it did not go "down". Some of you would really benefit in understanding how this works before spouting off and sounding like an idiot. pic.twitter.com/y5ZsgNCar6
The finality issue controversy persists, irrespective of its origin or duration. According to recent reports, transactions that appear to process might not get finalized, which could result in them being re-ordered or ignored.
