Ethereum devs dismiss issues following Bellatrix upgrade success

On Tuesday, the Bellatrix upgrade that was prepping Ethereum for the Merge was successfully finished. However, concerns were raised over an almost one in ten missed block rate across the last 600 slots.

Prior to the impending Merge, which is slated for sometime next week, the Bellatrix upgrade on the Beacon Chain updated Ethereum consensus layer clients at epoch 144896.

Martin Köppelmann, a co-founder of Gnosis, claims that 5% of the validators went offline during the hard fork, which increased the 9% missed block rate. Due to this, some observers questioned whether the network was ready to make the significant leap to proof-of-stake (PoS).

Missed block rate in the last 600 slots: >9%
Historically this rate has been around ~0.5%. It shows that Bellatrix caused some issues for some validators. Nothing dramatic but still a number to keep an eye on.

— koeppelmann.eth 🦉💳 (@koeppelmann) September 6, 2022

The 9% statistic, according to Köppelmann, was 1700% greater than the 0.5% historical lost block rate. The 25.6% of clients listed by Ethernodes as “not ready” for The Merge may be connected to the problem.

Adam Cochran, a partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, expressed his optimism that the “huge surge” in lost blocks will be fixed prior to the actual Merge, saying, “We really don't want to be seeing unanticipated concerns at this late point.”

However, not everyone is worried. Only 5% of validators leaving the network was, in fact, “an excellent result,” according to Daily Gwei founder Anthony Sassano, who also firmly said that “there's not really much that can go catastrophically wrong.” Using the Merge

“I would say that the ‘worst case scenario’ would be if the chain just halts because the switchover from PoW to PoS didn’t work at all – this would then require some sort of coordinated human intervention to fix.”

The developer said, “However if we observe things like validators dropping off the network due to configuration difficulties, missed blocks/slots, or some clients having serious bugs, these things wouldn't be the reason for major concern as they are pretty easy to recover from.

So to recap, post-Bellatrix, a few stats:
– network participation rate is 94.94%
– number of active validators is 403766
– number of offline validators 17743
– and client diversity for consensus layer clients page will be updated tomorrow so we can check again then

— Christine D. Kim (@christine_dkim) September 6, 2022

One of the final phases before the Merge is the Bellatrix upgrade, which enables Ethereum consensus layer clients to conduct transactions on the Beacon Chain.

The network will switch to a PoS consensus mechanism after the Ethereum Merge, which is expected to increase network efficiency and security.