Binance Briefly Suspends Ethereum Withdrawals As Network Suffers From ‘Minor Hard Fork’

The Ethereum network underwent what looks like a hard fork on Wednesday, as reports of outages and irregularities surfaced on infrastructure providers Infura and Blockchair.

Although initially believed to be an internal problem with Infura, a hosting service used by some exchanges and service providers to interact with the Ethereum network, independent node operators have also reported problems.

During the incident, Binance suspended withdrawals and its CEO Chanpheng Zhao reported to a “possible breaking of the chain” as culprit. The exchange is ever since resumed withdrawals at 10:20 UTC.

Blockchair, a popular block explorer, reported of a discrepancy between the blocks he saw and those published by Etherscan. After block 11234873 at 7:08 AM UTC, the two explorers started showing two different blockchains.

An image posted by the team shows at least 14 blocks mined on a minority chain, which seems to indicate that some miners have also suffered from the problem.

While the developers tried to fix the problem, Peter Szilagyi, head of the main Ethereum Geth node software, mentioned that the first action should be updating to the latest version.

Soon after, Blockchair reported that the Geth update fixed the problem, noting that there was probably an unplanned incompatibility introduced in new versions by the Geth developers.

Szilagyi noted that Infura is “using an ancient version of Geth” and therefore may have suffered from a similar sync problem.

In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Nikita Zhavoronkov, head of development of Blockchair, said: “It appears that a minor hard fork has occurred without anyone noticing”.

According to him, the developers “broke something in the latest releases,” which led to a consensus problem and an unplanned hard fork. Anyone who didn’t update to the latest version has been banned from the rest of the network. Szilagyi put a different twist on the issue, saying the new version “fixed a consensus bug.”

However, two parts of the network were unable to speak to each other, which caused significant, albeit temporary, problems. At press time, Infura has yet to restore full functionality.

Update, 10:30 UTC: Binance has resumed withdrawals.