Ethereum Developers Resolve Beacon Chain Finality Issues

Ethereum developers have taken measures to address the finality issues that occurred on the Beacon chain in the past week. On May 11 and May 12, the Beacon chain, the consensus layer of the Ethereum network, was unable to reach finality on two occasions. The first occurrence lasted for 25 minutes, and the second for over an hour. 

Although the exact cause of such an incident is yet unknown, it is worth stating that this network glitch had no impact on on-chain activity and transactions were still processed. 

In response to the past week, Ethereum developers have released patches to provide a solution for network users.

According to a tweet by Beacom Chain community health analyst superphiz, Teku and Prysm, two of Ethereum’s constitutional clients, have implemented these fixes, which will help prevent further finality issues on the Beacon chain. 

We can start putting this loss of finality issue behind us, @Teku_ConsenSys and @prylabs have deployed fixes that will prevent the attestation flooding. This is one step on our diversity & decentralization journey, let's learn from it and move forward with greater purpose. pic.twitter.com/cSRgPTWeuy

— superphiz.eth (@superphiz) May 13, 2023

Superphiz also shared a statement from the Ethereum Foundation in which they are speculating the cause of these “exceptional scenarios” to be the “high load of some Consensus Layer clients”. 

The Ethereum Foundation applauded client diversity which made it feasible for transactions to occur on the network, as not all client implementations were affected by the finality challenges.

The Ethereum Foundation also confirmed that the exact cause of the Beacon chain glitch is still unknown. However, they provided assurances that the upgrades implemented by Teku and Prsym would help avoid future occurrences via optimizations that will prevent beacon nodes from high resource usage during these situations. 

In other news, Ethereum’s total supply decreased in the months after The Merge. 

On September 15, 2022, The Merge occurred in which the Ethereum network fully transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), leading to Ethereum 2.0. 

In the 241 days after this historical event, data from the Ethereum supply analytics platform, ultrasound.money shows that ETH’s total supply has declined by 0.29%.

Since The Merge, over 653,000 ETH has been burned compared to the 425,000 ETH that has been minted in the last eight months resulting in a net negative change of about -227,000 ETH.

Interestingly, ultrasound.money predicts the total ETH supply to have increased at a rate of 3.244% per year had The Merge not occurred.

That said, if this deflationary trend continues, it would mean good news for long-term ETH investors. This is because a decrease in supply usually results in a rise in value. 

At the time of writing, ETH is trading at $1,805.77 with a total supply of 122.89 million. Along with most of the market, ETH showed a negative price movement in the last week, losing 5.36% of its value.