Critical vulnerability in the public test network, Shapella, which could potentially delay the Shanghai upgrade.
On Friday, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko announced that Marius VanDerWijden had discovered a vulnerability in the public test network Shapella. The issue arose during the full synchronization of empty blocks, which contain no transactions or withdrawals.
Other clients also reported the same issue. VanDerWijden reported that the team had found that Go Ethereum (Geth) client nodes were having difficulty syncing with the Zhejiang testnet.
"After four and a half hours of intense debugging, we were able to identify and fix the issue," VanDerWijden said. "We had received reports that Geth nodes were unable to sync with the Zhejiang devnet correctly. It turns out that if a block body was empty (no transactions or withdrawals), we weren't initializing it properly."
Developers are confident that the issue can be resolved with a patch, as testing it is relatively straightforward. Core developer Tim Beiko has even proposed an additional Hive test to ensure the issue is completely resolved.
Interestingly, Ethereum core developers believe that the issue will not affect the Sepolia upgrade, which is scheduled for February 28th at 4 AM UTC. The client releases and blog posts for the upgrade will be announced early next week.
The Shanghai upgrade, which is set to take place in March, will enable withdrawals of Ethereum staked on the Beacon Chain, as well as rewards. This upgrade is triggered by three testnets: Zhejiang, Sepolia, and Goerli.
Shapella refers to two Ethereum upgrades, “Shanghai” and “Capella”, which will allow users to withdraw from the execution layer and enhance the Beacon Chain consensus layer. Additionally, these upgrades will reduce gas fees on the network.
At Ethereum’s All Core Developers Conference Executive meeting on Thursday, other topics such as 4844 transaction changes, SSZ, RPC, and SELFDESTRUCT improvements were also discussed.
The upgrade to Ethereum is set to have a significant impact on its price. As the network transitions to Ethereum 2.0, the new features and capabilities of the platform will create a more efficient and secure blockchain.
This will lead to increased demand for the cryptocurrency, driving up its value. Additionally, the upgrade will reduce transaction fees, making it more attractive to users.
This could lead to an influx of new investors, further increasing the price of Ethereum. Finally, the upgrade will enable the network to process more transactions, making it more attractive to businesses and developers. All of these factors will contribute to a higher Ethereum price.
The highly anticipated Ethereum Shanghai upgrade is finally here, and Ethereum stakes are eager to remove their staked ETH from the beacon chain. This anticipation has caused Ethereum staking to surge ahead of the upgrade, with the amount of ETH staked on the beacon chain jumping to 16,692,823 and 519,517 active validators.
As the upgrade approaches, experts are predicting a retest of the $2,000 mark for ETH prices, which are currently trading at $1,662, down 1% in the last 24 hours and up 8% in the last week.
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