On May 25, seven blocks were reorganized on Ethereum’s Beacon chain at 8:55:23 a.m. (UTC) at block height 3,887,075 all the way to block 3,887,081. The reorganization was discovered by Martin Köppelmann who noted the “current attestation strategy of nodes should be reconsidered to hopefully result in a more stable chain.”
Ethereum Beacon Chain Reorganizations
While all eyes were on the development surrounding Ethereum’s upcoming transition to proof-of-stake (PoS) via The Merge, the chain that will be crucial for the transition, Ethereum’s Beacon Chain, has undergone a major revamp. in seven blocks.
A blockchain reorganization, otherwise known as a reorg, is basically a chain split and nodes receive blocks from a new chain amid the existence of the old chain. In the case of Ethereum’s Beacon chain, the reorganization occurred at block height 3,887,075 to block 3,887,081.
Martin Köppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis, noticed the event and tweeted it on social media. “The Ethereum beacon chain has undergone a deep reorganization of 7 blocks – 2.5 hours ago”, Köppelmann mentioned. “This shows that the current node attestation strategy should be reconsidered to hopefully result in a more stable chain… (proposals already exist).” Köppelmann added:
This, unfortunately, shows that the analysis by [Georgios Konstantopoulos] and [Vitalik Buterin] here was too optimistic when the article claimed reorg stability will improve in PoS over PoW. We have not seen 7 block reorgs on Ethereum mainnet in years… At this point, it is unclear whether the reorg we saw was caused by an attack or just unfortunate network conditions.
Vitalik Buterin: “Seeking the truth is more important than not giving rhetorical ammunition to the wrong people”
After raising the issue on Twitter, Köppelmann noticed that some of the attention his tweet got, especially from Ethereum critics, made him regret tweeting about it. “However, I think it’s a strength of the Ethereum community to openly discuss all challenges and put more energy into finding a better solution, instead of spending time defending an issue,” Köppelmann said. .
Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to Köppelmann’s regret comments and told the Gnosis co-founder not to regret it. “Truth-seeking is more important than ‘not giving the wrong people rhetorical ammunition’ or whatever,” Buterin said. “As long as truth-seeking results in action and not just commentary,” one individual responded to Buterin’s statement.
The co-founder of Ethereum replied: “In this case, the client teams have been working to understand the situation in order to determine what to correct in the last two hours – Already good assumptions.” Buterin’s response was linked to a tweet written by Ethereum developer Preston Vanloon who gave his thoughts on the reorganization situation. Vanloon mentioned:
We suspect this is caused by the implementation of Proposer Boost fork choice has not fully rolled out to the network. This reorg is not an indicator of a flawed fork choice, but a non-trivial segmentation of updated vs out of date client software.
The Ethereum blockchain reorganization follows both Vanloon and Buterin saying the merger could be implemented in August. However, Buterin was quick to follow up on his statement saying there is always a “risk of problems” and “delays”. He then said that September and October could also be possible.
