Ethereum's Two-Week Problem Is Over: It Can Be Reused! - Coin Newsletter

Holesky, one of Ethereum's two main testnets, has become usable again, overcoming the issue that has been going on for about two weeks.

On Feb. 24, the Holesky testnet network, where important tests were carried out by Ethereum developers, experienced a serious problem during the rollout of a major update called Pectra. This issue prevented transactions from being permanently confirmed, bringing testing efforts to a halt. However, it turned out that the source of the problem was not caused by the Pectra update itself, but by a configuration error in the client software on the network.

The Holesky network was finally back to normal on Monday, March 11, after nearly two weeks of rescue efforts. With the participation of more than two-thirds of the validators in the network, uninterrupted transaction confirmation was again achieved at the Epoch 119090 level at approximately 23:00 Turkey time. Right now, the development teams are focused on improving the stability of the nodes and completely restoring the system by cleaning up old data.

Apart from Holesky, Sepolia, another testnet actively used by Ethereum developers, was also affected by the Pectra update. Although the Sepolia network initially ran smoothly, it soon began producing empty blocks due to a bug in a private deposit contract. The source of the problem was that a user who attacked the system sent zero tokens to the contract, triggering an unexpected situation.

According to the information shared by Marius Van Der Wijden, one of the Ethereum developers, the attacker used this vulnerability of the system to cause an outage of about six hours. This problem was solved with the quick intervention of the teams.

With the Pectra update, which they plan to implement on the mainnet in the near future, Ethereum developers aim to implement innovations such as paying gas fees with tokens other than ETH, account abstraction, and increasing staking limits.