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- The Ethereum network suffered an unannounced hard fork.
- The developers confirmed they were working on a critical bug.
Sudden technical problems with infrastructure provider Ethereum Infura frightened the cryptocurrency community on Wednesday. Numerous trading platforms and wallet service providers, including Binance and MetaMask, have been forced to suspend ETH deposits and withdrawals, citing price updates. Read more details here.
The mystery explained
While Infura is investigating the problem and trying to figure out how to fix it, Ethereum developer team leader Peter Szilagyi has confirmed that the network has suffered an unannounced fork in his Twitter account. The team silently worked on a dormant bug, and the resulting update was triggered from a buggy chain to a good one.
Technically you are right that it was an “unannounced hard fork” (from bad to good chain). That said, silently fixing an inactive bug for 2+ years is much less likely to cause an outage than raising awareness. We strive to minimize potential damage.
– Péter Szilágyi (@peter_szilagyi) November 11, 2020
The developer explained that the damage from raising awareness of a bug that had been dormant for over two years could have been much more significant.
Unexpected fork, unexpected errors
Meanwhile, Nikita Zhavorinkov, the lead developer of Blockchair, explained that the code change quietly introduced by the ETH developers split the chain starting with block 11234873. Those nodes that failed to update in time got stuck in a chain minority. Among them were Blockchair, Infura and some miners.
Zhavorinkov also added that the failure of the consensus should not be taken lightly as it is the most serious problem Ethereum has faced since the DAO debacle four years ago.
But Ethereum is not the only one. Monero developer Riccardo Spagni confessed that his team has done the same thing on many occasions, secretly fixing bugs and not revealing problems for fear that they can be exploited before the fix was ready.
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