Crypto Crisis: Ethereum Mainnet’s 25-Minute Transaction Chaos Sparks Investigation into Block Finalization Failure

On May 11, the Ethereum mainnet came under fire as the developers reported that for a little under 30 minutes, the Ethereum blockchain was unable to complete transactions. On his Twitter, Ethereum contributor terence.eth, the problem has been resolved after lasting for about 25 minutes.

Mainnet has been finalized, and we are investigating the incident now. More to come!

— terence.eth (@terencechain) May 11, 2023

Superphiz, an Ethereum contributor, said that the blockchain is designed to resist issues like this, even though Ethereum’s beacon chain briefly ceased finalizing. The chain still handled transactions to some extent throughout the incident.

The beacon chain stopped finalizing about thirty minutes ago. I don't know why yet, but in general the chain is designed to be resilient against this, transactions will continue as usual and finalization will kick in when the problem is resolved. pic.twitter.com/utAS0uAWpG

— superphiz.eth 🦇🔊🛡️ (@superphiz) May 11, 2023

Although the root cause is still unknown, Superphiz believes the absence of diverse clientele may have contributed to the problem. He claimed that the loss of finality might have been prevented if no client had more than a third of the network’s dominance. Additionally, he noted that since no client had a supermajority, the blockchain was able to avoid forking.

Ethereum is primarily controlled by two consensus clients, Lighthouse and Prysm, which hold a combined share of 76%. It is worth noting that only three other clients stand out.

Previous Outages Experienced by Ethereum

This is not the first time for Ethereum to experience outages. In November 2020, Ethereum experienced a single point of failure When one of Ethereum’s clients failed to upgrade its software version. As a consequence, Infura, an Ethereum service provider maintained by ConsenSys, encountered a disruption in service, causing other services and firms to be temporarily unable to access the network’s data.

Due to the service outage, the Ethereum network underwent a temporary hard fork which resulted in the formation of two distinct blockchains with distinct data that operated in parallel.

In 2016, When Ethereum was still new, it was hit by a notorious Dao hack. The attack cost its users more than $50 million in losses. Nevertheless, despite this enormous setback, the network was able to get past the disaster and carry on expanding. It expanded during the ensuing years to become the second-biggest blockchain initiative.

Ethereum price prediction

Ethereum (ETH) is trading at 1,803.74 USD, with a 2.46% increase in the last 24 hours. According to data provided by the coin market cap, the total volume of Eth in the past 24 hours is $7.29 B, and it also ranks number 2 on the site. After trading below $1800 for more than 24 hours, the buying outweighs the sellers.

The ETH market has turned bullish once again. In order to sustain this positive momentum, buyers will need to ensure that the price of ETH remains above a certain level.