The delays on the Ethereum mainnet occurred with the Open Ethereum client. There was an addition of four improvement proposals (EIP) to the platform.
Berlin, the long-awaited update on the Ethereum mainnet, is finally active. However, there were synchronization delays on one of its clients. The activation of the hard fork occurred at the height of block 12,244,000.
Developers Tim Beiko and Hudson Jameson confirmed that information through their Twitter accounts. Additionally, Jameson explained that the programmers were reviewing the code to solve the synchronization failures with the Open Ethereum client.
“The OpenEthereum team and the Ethereum Core developers are aware of the situation. For that reason, they are working to diagnose and fix the problems that the OpenEthereum client is facing,” said Jameson, who is also a member of the Ethereum Foundation.
After posting a similar message, the Etherscan service said that the new block data would only be available after they solve the problem. According to the platform, Hiveon Pool mined the update block at about 6:00 a.m. New York time.
Most Nodes Are Active but Some Still Need Updating
The programmers opened an issue in the Open Ethereum repository for users to discuss what was happening. User madnadyka raised that there was a “node problem following the Berlin hard fork as it was not synchronizing after block 12,244,294”.
Data from Ethernodes indicates that 85.4% of the active nodes (1,421) are ready and synchronized, but 14.6% (about 242 nodes) are not yet synchronized. The most used client is Geth, with 1,185 synchronized nodes and another 171 on standby. Open Ethereum is the second most popular client on the network, with 199 nodes ready. However, it has synchronization failures and 28 other nodes still need updating.
Coinbase and Bitgo, among other cryptocurrency platforms, also reported the incident, which is affecting their operations. As a preventive measure, Coinbase even temporarily halted withdrawals in Ether and ERC-20 tokens. They also warned that incoming transactions to the exchange could suffer delays.
The Berlin Hard Fork Incorporated Four Enhancements into the Ethereum Network
Berlin is just one more step on the agenda of updates or forks that the Ethereum network is going through. The new hard fork implements a four-enhancement package (EIP) that would allow the smart contract platform to be faster, more secure, and cheaper.
The Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) of this update are 2565, 2718, 2929, and 2930. The first improvement seeks to reduce the cost of pre-compiled ModExp (modular exponentiation) contracts. Its goal is to reduce gas for one type of transaction to make advanced arithmetic operations more practical, according to developer Kelly Olson.
Standardization between different types of transactions occurs thanks to the EIP 2718 protocol. Concerning EIP 2929, it increases gas consumption for those operations that could lead to a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Finally, EIP 2930 is a new type of transaction that serves to create a pre-established list of addresses and amounts, which would reduce fees.
By Alexander Salazar
