A previously unknown bug in Ethereum’s consensus client “Prism” led to a significant drop in network participation in early December, temporarily impacting Ethereum and causing validators to miss out on approximately 382 ETH in rewards. This issue was introduced on Prism’s testnet about a month before the “Fusaka” upgrade but only manifested on the mainnet under specific conditions. The bug prevented affected validators from effectively processing attestations received from out-of-sync peers, causing nodes to replay old epoch blocks and recompute costly state transitions. This increased computational load degraded network performance, reducing participation to 75% and raising the missed slot rate to 18.5%, resulting in decreased attestation rewards for validators. Thanks to Ethereum’s client diversity—where Prism is the second-largest consensus client after Lighthouse—the incident was contained from becoming more severe. Prism developers quickly identified the problem, issued a temporary fix, and deployed a full patch that improved network conditions. This event underscores that bugs on testnets do not always immediately surface on mainnets and highlights the critical role of client diversity in safeguarding the network. It also serves as a reminder of past technical challenges, such as the temporary network disruption following last year’s Shanghai hard fork. Experts emphasize that maintaining client diversity and adopting robust testing procedures are essential for ensuring Ethereum’s future stability and growth.
Source: binance
