Why Ethereum’s Altair upgrade works so well

The Ethereum blockchain went through its third upgrade in seven months. And unlike the two previous upgrades, everything has gone smoothly so far.

Altair upgrade was pretty successful

Altair is the first (and perhaps last) upgrade of the Beacon Chain before Ethereum moves on to the full proof-of-stake network. According to Pooja Ranjan, Ethereum Cat Herders’ decentralized project manager, Altair was deployed with over 95% of the validators participating at the time of the upgrade. In other words, everyone spends their time updating their computers to run the latest software and connecting them to the Ethereum network.

In August, three weeks after the London hard fork, the proposed EIP-1559 put deflationary pressure on the network, causing the blockchain to temporarily split into two chains that process transactions at the same time. And the cause lies in an old version of the Geth software client. Although the bug was revealed on August 18th, almost two weeks after the upgrade, most of the people using the Geth software failed to update the nodes in a timely manner, resulting in a chain split a week later.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the old software, but the bug in the new code. In April, hours after the Berlin hard fork, nodes using the Open Ethereum client software stopped syncing because they were incompatible with other client software. As a result, anyone running this software to access the blockchain will have to wait for a fix.

One reason for the relatively high compatibility for Altair is that Ethereum validators are in a precarious state. An important aspect of the Altair upgrade is to increase the penalty for nodes that are inactive or always offline. Distributors who need to tie at least 32 ETH to the proof-of-stake network must be constantly online or their rewards will be cut.

Jeff Coleman, an Ethereum researcher, tweeted that validators who haven’t updated their nodes will gradually see their ETH balances go down. And that’s why Altair works very smoothly.

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After decryption

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