Ethereum developers are under pressure as Pectra upgrades deploy to new testnets following some unexpected issues that have slowed deployment to mainnets.
The Pectra upgrade, which was expected to hit Ethereum Mainnet in March, was rolled out on the network’s Holesky Testnet on February 24th. However, the upgrade failed to finalize on the network, prompting developers to investigate the cause and address it.
On March 5th, the update was deployed on Sepolia Testnet. However, the developers encountered the error again. This was exacerbated by an unknown attacker who uses “edge cases” to cause mining of empty blocks.
To prepare for an upgrade, Ethereum Core Developers created a new testnet called “Hoodi.”
Ethereum developers were “exhausted” from preparing Pectra
The hoodie will be released on March 17th, and the Pectra upgrade will be available at the hoodie on March 26th. If the upgrade runs smoothly, Pectra could hit the mainnet on April 25th.
In an interview with Felix Ng of Cointelegraph, Nixo Rokish, a member of the Ethereum Foundation’s protocol support team, said the developers are experiencing a lot while preparing for an upgrade to Pectra. Rokish told Cointelegraph:
“I think people are nervous because we basically had two testnets in a row. Basically, there’s a really unexpected issue that’s not basically related to how it went on with the mainnet.”
Rokish added that fatigue is set, especially for consensus layer developers, as it marks a third attempt to test Pectra.
“I think the consensus layers in particular are developers, but the current running layer developers are tired now,” Rokish told Cointelegraph.
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According to Rokish, some of the testnets in Holesky have failed because they have never been tested with such a small validator set in a standard chain.
“It has never been tested with very few validators on a standard chain, like Holesky’s.
When about 10% was left in the standard chain, the validator overloaded RAM and memory, while keeping 90% of the validators in the non-standard chain.
Rokish said they’ve never seen this. “And I think it was really tired for them because all of a sudden the consensus layer was having this problem where they had to change a lot,” she said.
Despite recent testnet challenges, wider developments of Ethereum continue to show progress.
On March 13, 2024, the network deployed Dencun upgrades and implemented many changes to the blockchain.
High gas prices, once a major problem for the network, have become a thing of the past. A year after Dencun upgrades, Ethereum gas prices fell 95%. On March 23rd, the average gas price reached a historic low of 0.28 GWEI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwo0hw_94a4
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