In the recent Ethereum Core Devs Meeting, the developers working on the Ethereum merge discovered many issues regarding the readiness of client teams for the merge.
Despite the issues, the developers remain confident to be able to deploy the merge on the Sepolia testnet by the 6th of July.
Shadow Fork Raises Questions On Merge Readiness
In the dev meeting, a long discussion was held regarding the issues surrounding Wednesday’s 7th mainnet shadow fork. According to the devs, the merge went poorly. 20% of the nodes dropped off after the activation and even more fell afterward.
Alexey Sharp, an independent researcher pointed out that part of the trouble, especially with the Erigon nodes, was related to the nature of shadow forks and not the merge itself. Similarly, the issue with Hyperledger Besu nodes was due to a concurrency bug in the nodes using bonsai tries. 25% of the network validators use the Besu software. These validators faced issues following the merge’s activation.
Nethermind-Teku client pair also discovered an issue, but the root cause for this is still being investigated.
