Prysmatic Labs employee Raul Jordan said the bug that disrupted Medalla's Ethereum 2.0 testnet would not affect the scheduled launch of the update.
The final Ethereum 2.0 testnet launched earlier this month. However, on August 14, Medalla split into four chains due to disruptions to the CDN Cloudflare service used by the Prysm client. This changed the internal time of the nodes by four hours, so the validators could not validate blocks correctly. Jordan said the failure resulted in a "massacre" of about 3,000 validators. However, he is optimistic and believes that such incidents should occur and be processed in the test network. The consequences could be more dire if such a vulnerability were discovered on the main network with real user funds.
After the discovery of this bug, a message from CoinGeek appeared on Twitter that Ethereum 2.0 was not ready to launch, and the deployment of the update had a very long time to come. To make matters worse, transaction fees continue to rise on the current Ethereum network. However, Jordan believes that the past week has been full of events, thanks to which the developers managed to gain valuable experience and they will take everything necessary to ensure that this situation does not repeat itself on the main network. Jordan added that claims about the "death" of the testnet are incorrect, because if enough validators are connected to the network, Medalla will become operational again.
“We still have hope. The number of network participants has grown from 0-5% to 40%. It remains to gain 66% more, ”he noted in the publication.
According to the developer Prysmatic Labs, what happened will not affect the launch date of the zero phase of Ethereum 2.0, which is expected 2-3 months after the release of the zero block of Medalla. In the near future, the developers will publish a list of new requirements for the launch of the update regarding client security and resilience. In addition, this week the Prysmatic Labs team unveiled the Alpha.22 solution that will help address current sync issues on the Medalla testnet.
