Holesky hiccup tests Ethereum’s resilience

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Ethereum developers on Monday initiated the Pectra upgrade on the Holesky testnet to evaluate the upgrade’s production readiness.

Shortly after activation, the Holesky testnet experienced issues with finalizing transactions. Hildobby, a data analyst at Dragonfly, noted that Holesky was down for almost two hours following the upgrade. Hildobby attributed it to “buggy code [causing] an invalid block that most execution clients accepted.”

The issue affected Besu, Nethermind and Geth, while Erigon and Reth operated correctly.

However, developers assessed that the issue is unique to Holesky — a result of a misconfigurating specific to that testnet that wouldn’t occur on Ethereum mainnet. It’s not a problem with Pectra code, per se, according to Ethereum Foundation’s Parithosh Jayanthi.

“There are learnings we can take forward, but it isn’t a bug with a wide surface area,” Jayanthi said. “We may take some time to manually verify some things, but the problem seems fully explained.”

A case like this shows the benefits of client diversity. A heterogeneous client ecosystem ensures that no single software implementation becomes a systemic point of failure, improving Ethereum’s resilience and decentralization.

Meanwhile, efforts are underway to rectify the issues on Holesky. But “recovery is very difficult,” Geth developer Marius van der Wijden said.

“This whole thing will make Ethereum much stronger,” according to van der Wijden. Waxing poetic, he added “we will mend the cracks with gold and be better prepared for any eventualities in the future.”

Pectra aims to introduce account abstraction and bolster layer-2 scaling solutions:

• EIP-7702: A new transaction type allows Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) to temporarily adopt smart contract-like behavior by dynamically assigning executable code.
• Increased Blob capacity: Pectra doubles Ethereum’s blob capacity, increasing the average number of blobs per block from three to six. Blobs serve as temporary data storage for layer-2 solutions, enabling them to submit compressed transaction data to the mainnet more efficiently to reduce transaction costs. 
• Validator reward cap increase: Pectra raises the maximum balance of which a validator can receive rewards, from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. This change encourages larger stakes and potentially enhances network security and scalability by reducing the total number of validators — currently over 1 million. 

This Holesky deployment is part of the critical testing phase. The Sepolia testnet will follow before the anticipated mainnet launches in April.

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