Ethereum’s upgrade via the Bellatrix hard fork has been completed. It didn’t go as smoothly as the developers had planned, but there is no danger to the main network.
Yesterday, most of the Ethereum nodes were upgraded during the Bellatrix hard fork. According to Martin Köppelmann, CEO and co-founder of the Gnosis prediction market platform, about 5% of the validators were disabled during the update. This resulted in nearly 9% of blocks missing in the last 600 slots.
Köppelmann says historically, Ethereum’s block miss rate is only ~0.5%. The current rate is 18 times higher, meaning the Bellatrix upgrade didn’t go as smoothly as planned. However, Köppelmann believes that “nothing dramatic” actually happened.
The problem of missing so many blocks during the Bellatrix upgrade is most likely because about a quarter of Ethereum nodes was unprepared for The Merge ahead of the upgrade. According to Ethernodes, as of September 7, 2022, 11:00 a.m. (GMT+3), about 500 nodes (24%) still haven’t upgraded to the version required for the transition.
Well, the community also reacted to the event. Some observers questioned the network’s readiness to move to PoS. For example, Adam Cochran, partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, expressed hope that the team could fix the missing blocks before The Merge, as investors wouldn’t want “to be seeing unexpected issues at this late stage.”
According to Anthony Sassano, founder of Daily Gwei and co-founder of EthHub, the potential problems with The Merge aren’t due to missing blocks in the Bellatrix upgrade process at all, which are “relatively easy to recover from.” Sassano believes the most critical issue for The Merge can only be a complete halt to adding blocks. Then Ethereum’s transition from PoW to PoS won’t “work at all.”
ETH also responded. According to CoinMarketCap, the price is $1,516 as of September 7, 11:00 (GMT+3), down 9% in 24 hours.
Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, once again reminded node operators to update the client to the current version. Tim Beiko, Ethereum’s lead developer, also mentioned the need to upgrade nodes, arguing that this is the “last chance” for nodes before The Merge.
Ethereum’s merge and full transition of the blockchain to the PoS consensus algorithm are scheduled for September 13-15 during an official event called “Paris Upgrade,” which will be broadcast online.
You can read about the pros and cons of Ethereum’s upgrade in the op-ed. Recall that the Ethereum Foundation team pays $1 million for bug fixes in preparation for The Merge.
