On Wednesday, the Ethereum blockchain suffered an “unannounced” hard fork, apparently caused by the failure to update the Go Ethereum (Geth) client on the Infura infrastructure.
Infuria, the largest provider of infrastructure Ethereum, presented service problems that appear to be caused by the customer Go Ethereum, popularly known as Geth, presuming that this client is running an outdated version on the network. The interruption of the provider's services caused the network nodes, which use its infrastructure, to present multiple delays in the price feed. ETH y Tokens ERC-20 of some protocols and services that run on this network.
The provider posted a release warning about service outages and other issues that were occurring on Wednesday morning, informing the crypto community that they were experiencing a service interruption on the Ethereum API, and that the team was investigating the failures in order to find a quick solution and restore the functionality of their service. Then, a few hours later, Infura reported that the problem was related to the Geth client and that it affected several of its versions, including 1.9.9 and 1.9.13.
“The cause was traced back to several components within our infrastructure that were using an older stable version of the go-ethereum client which led to a critical consensus error at block 11234873.”
Although at press time, Infura posted an update reporting that all services had been restored and were up and running again, Blockchair developer, Nikita Zhavoronkov, He says that this is not an incident that should be underestimated, and that in his opinion, this is the most serious problem that Ethereum has faced since the hack a DAO in 2016.
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«Ethereum's biggest problem»
Zhavoronkov claims that what happened was "technically an unannounced hard fork," and that it happened in a very similar way to the one that occurred Bitcoin (BTC) 7 years ago, when there was a update and this caused a hard fork that was quickly resolved. However, Zhavoronkov assures that this hard fork fork should not be underestimated, and in his opinion, it is a failure for the Ethereum consensus, which should be considered as "the most serious problem Ethereum has faced since the DAO debacle 4 years ago."
The developer also indicated that users who have not updated their Geth nodes for a while, at least for several months, were split up with those nodes that are running new versions of this client; adding that the outage suffered by Infura is likely related to this same issue.
Why does a hard fork happen?
A hard fork, also known as a hard fork, is a major update that occurs within a protocol, and forces all nodes and users to move to new software if they want to continue using the same blockchain or blockchain.
Hard forks occur when one version of the network is no longer compatible with previous versions, forcing users to choose between one version or another, and causing the network to split or fork into two parts.
Learn with Bit2Me Academy: Learn all about hard forks
Binance temporarily closed ETH trading
At the time of the hard fork, Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao, reported on its Twitter account that it would temporarily suspend operations and withdrawals with ETH and ERC-20 tokens, as a protection measure for users until the problem was clarified. Likewise, the Ethereum wallet MetaMask and the Bithumb exchange also presented problems with their services, since both use Infura as a service provider by default.
In his post, Zhao also noted that block explorers Etherscan y block Chair They were displaying two different blockchains, so withdrawals had to be temporarily suspended.
Later, Zhao reported that its services had been restored and that users could resume their deposit and withdrawal operations on the exchange platform.
Centralization in a decentralized ecosystem
However, despite the solution to the problems, several users of this exchange They strongly criticized the centralization of services, pointing out that Binance must run and manage its own nodes on ETH. In response, Zhao said that Binance does run its own nodes, but that it suspended services because it was unsure whether operations would be left on an orphan chain.
Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino noted that cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance and Bithumb should not fall into the “trap of relying solely on a centralized service provider like Infura, as long as they are operating within a “decentralized industry like crypto.” Finally, block explorer Blockchair shows that at least 14 blocks that were mined during the incident remained on a minority chain.
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