Ethereum’s ETH has finally crawled back over $3,000 and a lot of work is frantically going on behind the scenes to ensure that the merge takes place smoothly. But that does not mean the process is free of hiccups. After what was deemed to be a “minor” incident a few days ago, the Ethereum community came together to decode what exactly went wrong.
Make Teku your time
The incident in question happened on March 15 and led to a drop in participation on the Beacon channel. The crash report revealed that this was due to “garbage collection activity” from the Teku client, causing nodes to be delayed for up to an hour. The report noted,
“This resulted in varying combinations of increased rates of incorrect head votes, increased attestation inclusion delays or entirely missed attestations. Some nodes may have crashed with OutOfMemoryError.”
The report observed that validator keys were not affected. Teku was in charge of less than 33% of the stake, so it was not a critical emergency. Still, the 4,000 deposits that were made were a problem.
A fixed version has been shared and Teku is up and running again, but even so, let’s give Ethereum a general check-up just to be sure.
Inhale Exhale
Needless to say, development activity is the lifeblood of Ethereum. However, it has been in steep decline since around mid-March. It’s not fair to blame Teku for this since they are a minority customer, but the decline in development activity was still an alarming trend.
Next up, from an investment perspective, we can see ETH rapidly moving off the exchanges. This can be attributed to the leading alt’s gradual rally from around $2,500 to above $3,100. Those who came in to buy right at the very end missed the dip opportunity, but are probably hoping that the rally will continue.
What about Ethereum network ovens? Well, the community recently celebrated the burning of two million ETH. As of press time, approximately $6,375,201,963 has been burned in total.
What’s more, average gas prices were falling as well. On 26 March, average Ethereum gas prices stood at 34.69 gwei. Furthermore, prices have been falling since the 200+ gwei rates seen in January 2022.
Only as happy as your most unhappy investor?
With prices rising and average gasoline prices falling, investors should have been pleased. However, Santiment revealed that the total weighted sentiment for Ethereum was firmly in negative territory. On price time, it reached -1.116. While not the most encouraging signals, low levels of euphoria could perhaps help the rally continue.
