Ethereum 2.0 Testnet Gets Up And Running

The ethereum 2.0 testnet is now finalizing again in that blocks are being proposed and are moving but the participation rate is all over the place although getting a lot better.

Epochs are now finalized seemingly just fine with the network seemingly getting stable.

You can see above the staked eth fluctuation with the participation rate being even more volatile.

The network was stuck at epoch 3598, which was about an hour ago, with it not finalizing as the participation rate moved up and down, but new epochs are now steadily finalizing as pictured above.

“As this happens, more recent people will get activated hopefully improving participation because they are more eager and engaged,” Raul Jordan of Prysmatic says.

It’s not clear why the participation rate was fluctuating with some stating their node slashed some block proposers.

Yet this saga seems to be coming to an end, hopefully, with participation now getting more stable and epochs finalizing more consistently.

If that is the case, with it to become clearer in the next few hours, then tons would have been learned from this episode.

The initial bug itself was minor and easy to fix, but its effects showed what can happen in what is the second worst case scenario, the very worst one being if conflicting blocks are finalized in an attack.

There were coding errors made during the attempt to fix the bug that made matters worse, but eventually this finalized. However on finalization some other bug was discovered. Nishant Das of Prysmatic says:

“We had a finalized root bug which manifested after we took 1000 epochs to finalize. That has been patched on our end and teku had issues too which has been fixed as far as I know.

Also another reason participation was already very fragile so it was hard to come back to that state.”

So the issue on finalization was some little bug instead of a far more serious consensus failure which can’t be reconciled.

They fixed their clients and now this is running and it looks like it is running in a stable manner.

So that makes it all good for eth because quite a few bugs were found here which is the whole point of the testnet.

Meaning if this does keep running and nicely for the next two months, the genesis block can launch in November.

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