Ethereum developers resolve Beacon Chain finality issues

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The Ethereum network suffered another technical issue which prevented the transaction finality for some time. In response to a Beacon chain issue, the core developers of Ethereum rolled out patches for Teku clients and Prysm Labs. 

In the PoS Ethereum ecosystem, the Beacon Chain acts as the consensus layer for Ethereum.

On the 11th of May, developers reported problems being faced by the Beacon Chain in transaction finality because of an unknown issue. A similar qualm was repeated the next day that stopped finalisation of blocks for over an hour.

The Ethereum Foundation revealed in a statement that the block finalisation was not being reached for three and eight epochs, which was shared on Twitter by an Ethereum consultant. It was apparently because of an unusually high load on some consensus layer clients.

Superphiz.eth, the consultant, was optimistic about the finality issue being resolved. He said, “This is one step on our diversity and decentralisation journey; let’s learn from it and move forward with greater purpose.”

Despite the issue, client diversity allowed the live and end users to carry out transactions over the network. Notably, client diversity refers to the vast number of clients that are available to network validators which makes the network more robust. As a result, this issue wasn’t faced by all the clients.

Teku clients and Prysm Labs have upgraded the versions which stop Beacon nodes from utilising excessive resources. 

Preston van Loon, Prysm Labs co-founder said that Thursday’s issue seemed to have "happened to cause several client implementations to work really hard to keep up with the chain."

With the problem reappearing on Friday, he tweeted that "we've tagged v4.0.4-rc.0 for Prysm which has the fix, but we haven't had time to test it thoroughly."

Ethereum’s activity has recently gone up with all the hype about trading memecoins for good rewards. As per on-chain data, around 46 million dollars were made by validators in May’s first week itself.

With the Ethereum network constantly growing and adapting, its developers are committed to ensuring that the platform is safe and stable for its user community. It tries to ensure client diversity and claims to be more resilient against such issues for the future.

Shashank is the founder of yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash