- Vitalik Buterin has praised Ethereum for achieving a major milestone in customer diversity at the execution layer.
- Ethereum plans to run multiple execution clients in parallel while verifying blocks.
Ethereum [ETH] has achieved a major milestone by preventing top execution customers of validators from having a supermajority market share. Commenting on the update, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin called it the “robustness” of the ecosystem.
‘No fulfillment customer has more than 2/3 market share. Great news for the robustness of the Ethereum L1.”
Source: X/Vitalik Buterine
The ETH supermajority customer risk problem
For context, validators that execute staking and pools use Ethereum execution client software. A dominant execution client, i.e. the one used by the most validators and having more than 2/3 of the market share, is considered a supermajority client and poses a risk to the entire ecosystem.
According to the Supermajority trackera supermajority customer could cause a network split and even fund loss in case of bugs.
‘It has the ability to complete the chain without the consent of the other customers. A consensus bug within such a customer would have catastrophic consequences, such as a network split, loss of money and damage to reputation.’
Furthermore, the supermajority client could lead to consensus errors and mistakes from validators (block proposals and verifiers), which could result in heavy penalties through cuts (destroying part of their stake/deposit).
In short, overwhelming customer risk translates into centralization risk that can impact the entire ecosystem. According to Ethereum team leader Peter Szilágyi, the influence could even be terrible for the chain’s adoption.
Worse, if a majority of validators get it wrong, the bad chain can be completed, leading to difficult governance issues about how to recover from the mistake, with perverse incentives for the majority of validators not to do so . Such an event could have a chilling effect on the entire adoption of Ethereum.”
In the past, Geth (Go Ethereum) was the most dominant and until recently popular execution layer client.
Source: Ethereum
To mitigate risk, the ecosystem advocated customer diversity and urged users to opt for minority execution customers. Currently, Nethermind is the most dominant client, surpassing Geth. However, at the time of writing, Nethermind was not a majority customer.
Interestingly enough, a new one proposal was created to help validator nodes verify blocks with multiple clients in parallel to further minimize supermajority risk.
Meanwhile, ETH price consolidated below $2800 after Friday’s impressive rebound. It remains to be seen whether investors’ risk approach will continue next week.