Ethereum Devs Found Critical Bug Ahead Of Major Upgrade

Marius VanDerWijden, a core developer at Ethereum’s upcoming Shanghai-Capella upgrade, reported a bug found on testnet Zhejiang. VanDerWijden stated:

The last 4 and a half stressful hours of debugging culminated in this amazing bug fix. We got reports that geth nodes wouldn’t sync the Zhejiang devnet correctly. The issue was that if a block body was empty  (no tx, no withdrawals) we wouldn’t initialize it correctly

Ethereum Keeps Improving Ahead Of Its Network Upgrade

According to Ethereum’s core developer Tim Beiko, this bug can be “patched quickly.” He also said it’s an “easy” test for the developers. In addition, the developers will be adding a Hive test for this case.

The goal of the Zhejiang testnet is to stress test withdrawals and BLS, a digital signature scheme used to prevent forgery. In Ethereum’s testnet, the validators sign and attest blocks to ensure that all of them follow the consensus rules. Using a signature scheme like BLS can help to address this problem. 

Verifying those on-chain signatures may lead to more issues as the number of validators keeps increasing. Tim Beiko Stated:

The devnet had 600k validators, and 360k of them perform withdrawal credential updates right at the fork.

Ethereum is on the verge of the expected Shanghai-Capella upgrade, improving its computation, transactions, and validation of new blocks. Still, most importantly, it will allow validators to withdraw their ETH locked on the “Beacon Chain,” the Proof-of-Stake blockchain launched in 2020.

Ethereum is currently trading at $1,680, which represents a gain of 1.3% in the last 24 hours. Ethereum has followed Bitcoin’s lead and remained in the profit zone in the last seven days with a gain of 2%. 

Ethereum continues to develop its network, and the Shanghai-Capella upgrade will signify a stronger foundation for its future. This may come with excitement from investors and allow the second-largest cryptocurrency to reach new yearly highs in the short term. 

The next upgrade will introduce sharding capabilities and give the blockchain more capacity to access data and lower transaction fees for services on the network. This next upgrade for the development of this blockchain is expected to be launched in late 2023.