A 25% dip in Ethereum’s voting participation coincided with a bug in the Prysm consensus client shortly after the Fusaka upgrade, with the network just 9% away from losing finality.
Shortly after the Fusaka network upgrade, the Ethereum network saw a sharp drop in validator participation after a bug in the Prysm consensus client knocked a chunk of votes offline.
According to a Thursday Prysm announcement, version v7.0.0 of the client unnecessarily generated old states while processing outdated attestations, a flaw that Prysm core developer Terence Tsao said prevented the nodes from functioning correctly. Developers recommended that users launch the client with the “–disable-last-epoch-targets” flag as a temporary workaround.
Beaconcha.in network data shows that at epoch 411,448, the network achieved only 75% sync participation (the percentage of 512 randomly selected nodes signing chain heads) and 74.7% voting participation. Voting participation being down 25% is under 9% shy of the network losing the two-thirds supermajority needed to maintain finality and regular operation.