Ethereum 2.0 network unintentionally forks for the first time

Yesterday, May 25, the Ethereum 2.0 network had an involuntary fork that lasted 7 blocks (approximately 2 minutes).

This event is the first to occur in this new version of the network created by Vitalik Buretin.

Such a scenario occurs when there is a desynchronization between nodes.

What happened was that some of them did not share the same number of blocks as the others, and this caused those that were out of sync to momentarily create a new chain. After 7 blocks, the network detected the mismatch and automatically reorganized itself.

It seems that this may delay the blockchain migration from the BNB to Ethereum of some projects that are in pre-launch phase, such as CHO, Minosis Token or LunaFi (projects of all kinds) projects that drive the blockchain development, but due to this unexpected event we must wait for news from the Ethereum team to continue.

Martin Köppelmann, co-founder of the Gnosis platform, indicated that a reorganization of this magnitude had not been seen in years in Ethereum (in this case Ethereum 1.0).

To better understand what happened, it is necessary to know that, in a blockchain network, each mined block has information about the number (header) of the previous block. When a reorganization occurs, it means that there is no chaining between blocks, because a block is not pointing directly to the previous block.

In the case of the current incident, as shown in the image above, the block was pointing to a block that was 7 blocks behind.

Since the Ethereum 2.0 network is not yet validating transactions (and will not do so until the merge occurs), Ethereum users did not notice any irregularities. However, in an operational network, a reorganization means that transactions that were validated on the rejected blocks are cancelled.

Reorganizations can be considered common behavior, of 1 block, or even 2. However, as Kölppelmann himself points out, 7-block reorganizations should not exist, and developers should take measures that counter these scenarios.

In this case, Tsao commented, "I'm sure we will see less of this when more nodes are updated for the boost-enabled version."