A developer has found a bug after implementing the Bellatrix update that has caused the loss of one in ten blocks for 600 slots.
La Bellatrix update, which prepares the Ethereum network for the merger with the Beacon Chain, was successfully completed yesterday, Tuesday, September 6. However, a group of developers have expressed their fears after finding a bug that caused the loss of one in ten blocks that were created during 600 slots.
Bellatrix upgrades Ethereum consensus layer clients to Beacon Chain epoch 144896, being the last step before the merger, which is planned for the next week and that will change the consensus mechanism from ETH to Proof-Of-Stake.
However, during hard fork 5% of validators went offline, which contributed to the rate of lost blocks being greater than 9%, as pointed out by Martin Köppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis.
This problem led some users to consider whether Ethereum was really ready for the merger. This is because, although seemingly low, the 9% lost block rate is a 1700% higher than usual, which is usually not higher than 0,5%.
However, the problem could be because 25,6% of Ethereum consensus layer clients is not “Merge ready”, according to Ethernodes data.
The community is not worried
Despite this bug, most of the Ethereum community is not worried. The majority believes that this spike of lost blocks will be purged before the final implementation of The Merge, so there will be no unexpected problems in the last stage.
Others point out that the fact that only 5% of the network's validators went down was a “amazing result", so it would be rare for really serious problems to occur in this final stage.
For Anthony Sassano, founder of Daily Gwei, the worst case scenario would be that the consensus change would cause the blockchain will stop working completely, which would require some kind of developer intervention to fix. On the other hand, validators leaving, block losses or client failures are just minor problems that are not a concern.
