On the evening of September 6, the Ethereum core developers launched the last major upgrade before the merger – “Bellatrix”. Although the process went smoothly, the “Missed Block Rate” of the Ethereum network soared after the upgrade. 1,700%, causing a lot of concerns in a short period of time.
“Bellatrix” is a hard fork that merges Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0, and is also a necessary step before the official merger.
However, according to Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann, 5% of validators went offline during the hard fork, causing Ethereum’s “missing block rate” to soar to 9%, which is higher than the usual 0.5% “blocking rate” At 1,700%, observers can’t help but question whether Ethereum is really ready for a merger.
What is “block leakage rate”?
Specifically, “block leakage rate” refers to the frequency of “the network fails to verify transaction blocks”. Usually, only 0.5% of Ethereum blocks will fail verification on the first attempt. However, in the Bellatrix upgrade After that, more than 9% of the blocks could not be verified.
In this regard, the core developers of Ethereum explained that this situation may be caused by the failure of the node operator to upgrade the client software. According to Ethernodes data, as many as 24.7% of nodes have not yet been updated; 75.3% of nodes have been updated, exceeding the minimum threshold required for the upgrade, meaning that the merger will proceed as scheduled.
Adam Cochran, a partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, said he hoped the “leaky block rate” would be under control before the merger, adding: “We really don’t want to see unexpected issues at the last minute.”
Should you be worried about the “leaking block rate” soaring?
Even so, some people still choose to be optimistic. For example, Anthony Sassano, the founder of Daily Gwei, said that only 5% of the validators are offline, which is actually a “pretty remarkable result.” He said confidently: “Actually, Mergers are unlikely to go catastrophically wrong.”
Anthony Sassano believes that the worst-case scenario is that Ethereum stops functioning in the process of switching to PoS, which will require some kind of human intervention to solve. He added that if things like validators drop out of the network due to configuration issues, missing blocks, or a major error on some client side, those things aren’t a major concern because they’re relatively easy to recover from.
As the “Bellatrix” upgrade has come to an end, the merged upgrade will then enter the second phase – “Paris”, which is Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, this phase of the upgrade is expected to happen around September 13-15.
