On May 25, seven blocks were reorganized on Ethereum’s Beacon chain at 8:55:23 a.m. (UTC) at block height 3,887,075 all the way to block 3,887,081. The reorganization was discovered by Martin Köppelmann who noted the “current attestation strategy of nodes should be reconsidered to hopefully result in a more stable chain.”
While all eyes have been glued to development surrounding Ethereum’s upcoming transition to proof-of-stake (PoS) via The Merge, the chain that will be crucial to the transition, Ethereum’s Beacon chain, suffered a seven-block deep reorganization.
This, unfortunately, shows that the analysis by [Georgios Konstantopoulos] and [Vitalik Buterin] here was too optimistic when the article claimed reorg stability will improve in PoS over PoW. We have not seen 7 block reorgs on Ethereum mainnet in years… At this point, it is unclear whether the reorg we saw was caused by an attack or just unfortunate network conditions.
We suspect this is caused by the implementation of Proposer Boost fork choice has not fully rolled out to the network. This reorg is not an indicator of a flawed fork choice, but a non-trivial segmentation of updated vs out of date client software.
What do you think about Ethereum’s recent seven-block deep reorganization? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
