The Ethereum blockchain received its third upgrade in seven months on Wednesday. And, unlike the last two upgrades, this one has gone off without a hitch.
Before Ethereum fully moves to a proof-of-stake network, the Altair update was the first (and maybe last) upgrade to the Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain, which pioneered ETH staking and laid the groundwork for “shard chains” that enhance the network’s capacity, coexists with the current Ethereum chain but will remain separate until the “merge” to Ethereum 2.0, which promises a quicker, less congested network.
“Altair was deployed with over 95 percent validator engagement at the time of the upgrade,” says Pooja Ranjan, leader of the Ethereum Cat Herders, a decentralized project management team. In other words, users took the time to update their workstations so that they could connect to the Ethereum network using the most recent software.
For the sake of network security, this is critical.
The Altair beacon-chain upgrade is live! Pretty smooth upgrade, even got some time to paint on @POAPartFind Waldo -> Find Proto pic.twitter.com/VSGpKuPFV7— proto.eth 🚂 🦇 🔊 (@protolambda) October 27, 2021
The blockchain temporarily forked in August, three weeks after the London update ushered in deflationary pressure to the network via EIP-1559, with two chains processing transactions at the same time.
An obsolete version of Geth, the most popular software client for accessing the Ethereum blockchain, was to blame. Despite the fact that the flaw was discovered on August 18, nearly two weeks after the upgrade, most Geth users failed to update their nodes, resulting in the chain splitting a week later.
The problem isn’t always old software, but rather a flaw in the new code. Nodes using the Open Ethereum client software stopped synchronizing in April, hours after the Berlin hard fork, because it didn’t agree with other client software.
As a result, everyone trying to connect to the blockchain using that software had to wait for a repair. Etherscan, a block explorer website, was temporarily unavailable due to the problem. Since Ethereum promotes client diversity as a means of avoiding a single point of failure, the problem was quickly resolved with limited collateral damage.
One explanation for Altair’s relatively high adoption is that Ethereum validators now have something to lose. The penalty for idle or offline nodes was increased as part of the Altair update. Stakers, who must contribute at least 32 ETH to the proof-of-stake network in order to guarantee security yet receive ETH in the form of block rewards, must stay online or their stake will be reduced.
Validators who haven’t upgraded their nodes will gradually see their balances lowered, according to Jeff Coleman, an Ethereum expert. “If they don’t fix it they will cross a threshold and be ejected,” he wrote.
