The Ethereum Beacon Chain Faces the Greatest Blockchain Reorganization in Years
Today, the Ethereum Beacon Chain network executed a seven-block rearrangement. Between 08:55:23 and 08:56:35 UTC, seven blocks from 3,887,075 to 3,887,081 were knocked off the Beacon Chain.
The Ether Beacon Chain Reorganization
December 1, 2020, saw the Beacon Chain debut, bringing native staking to the Ethereum blockchain. A significant element of the proof-of-stake consensus architecture is that validators will become eligible to add blocks to the chain by committing assets to the network. The reorg may have been a huge security risk.
It might be the consequence of a glitch or a deliberate attempt by a miner with a lot of resources. In such cases, the chain forks or duplicates accidentally. This poses a very high-grade security risk.
The fork that was finally discarded had seven blocks of transactions added to it before the network concluded it wasn’t the canonical chain. According to Etherscan.io, each block on the Ethereum chain comprises around 200 to 300 transactions and has a value of about 2 ETH, or roughly $4,000.
When two rival blockchains exist, even for a short time, there’s a chance that someone will be able to spend the identical assets twice.
What do Experts Have to Say?
According to developers on the network, the main issue lies more towards a circumstance, excluding security weaknesses or unforeseen defects. They emphasized a ‘proposer boost fork.’ It is a way to select the next block on the blockchain where particular promoters have priority.
The event, as per Köppelmann, said
“This indicates that the present node attestation technique should be revised in order to hopefully result in a more stable chain! (proposals already exist). It indicates there’s still more work before the Merge, which is set to take place later this year.”
Preston Van Loon, a core Ethereum engineer, believes that the reorganization occurred due to “the deployment of Proposer Boost fork,” a process in which selected proposers are given priority for picking the next block on the network. While the reorganization is bound to create concerns about the timeframe, Van Loon and the other developers have yet to say if it will affect.
In a post last year, Buterin and Konstantopoulos said,
“On rare occasions, terrible luck can lead to 2-5 block reorgs. Reorgs that last longer are generally always the result of severe network failure, client problems, or malicious assaults.”
According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, this notion is a “good hypothesis,” with client teams attempting to grasp the issue to suggest a solution.
Hugo Nguyen, the Nunchuk Bitcoin (BTC) wallet creator, chastised Ethereum developers for claiming that the incident had a meager chance rather than actively resolving it. “Isn’t system security merely a big coincidence? People, deploy and pray,” he stated.
