Ethereum developers have taken steps to address the finality issues that have occurred in the Beacon chain over the past week. On May 11 and May 12, the Beacon chain, the consensus layer of the Ethereum network, failed to reach finality twice. The first incident lasted 25 minutes and the second more than an hour.
While the exact cause of such an incident is still unknown, it is worth noting that this network outage did not affect on-chain activity and transactions continued to be processed.
Ethereum developers are rolling out network patches to take on Finality Challenge
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 in the Beacon chain.
We can begin to put this loss of finality behind us, @Teku_ConsenSys And @prylabs have implemented fixes that prevent the attestation from overflowing. This is one step on our diversity and decentralization journey, let’s learn from it and move forward with a greater purpose. pic.twitter.com/cSRgPTWeuy
— superphiz.eth 🦇🔊🛡️ (@superphiz) May 13, 2023
Superphiz also shared a statement from the Ethereum Foundation speculating that the cause of these “exceptional scenarios” is the “high load on some Consensus Layer clients.”
The Ethereum Foundation applauded the client diversity enabling transactions on the network as not all client implementations were impacted by the finality challenges.
The Ethereum Foundation also confirmed that the exact cause of the Beacon chain glitch is still unknown. However, they have given assurances that the upgrades implemented by Teku and Prsym would help prevent future events via optimizations that prevent beacon nodes from having high resource usage in these situations.
The total supply of ETH drops after the merger
In other news, Ethereum’s overall supply declined in the months following The Merge.
On September 15, 2022, The Merge took place, with the Ethereum network transitioning completely from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), leading to Ethereum 2.0.
In the 241 days following this historic event, data from the Ethereum analytics platform, ultrasound.money shows that the total supply of ETH decreased by 0.29%.
Source: ultrasound.money
Since The Merge, more than 653,000 ETH has been burned compared to the 425,000 ETH minted in the past eight months, resulting in a net negative change of approximately -227,000 ETH.
Interestingly, ultrasound.money predicts that the total ETH supply would have increased by 3.244% per year had The Merge not occurred.
That said, if this deflationary trend continues, it would be good news for ETH investors in the long run. This is because a decrease in supply usually results in an increase in value.
At the time of writing, ETH is trade for $1,805.77 with a total supply of 122.89 million. Along with most of the market, ETH has shown a negative price movement over the past week, losing 5.36% of its value.
ETH Trading At $1804.73 | Source: ETHUSD Chart on Tradingview.com
Featured image: Forbes, chart from TradingView