Yesterday there was news about the Ethereum network going down due to ConcsenSys' Infura server problem. These servers form the basis of many decentralized financial applications (DeFi) to the Ethereum network.
This incident had disturbed the operation of the Ethereum network, especially the MetaMask, MakerDAO, Uniswap, Compound and MyCrypto applications when used by users. This has also led to the world-renowned exchange, Binance, temporarily halting Ethereum trading when it notices a transaction “going off track” on the Ethereum node.
A few hours later, it was discovered the exact cause of the problem. This is due to a bug in Go Ethereum (Geth) which supports 80% of the basic Ethereum application. This event eventually caused the Ethereum blockchain network to split in two.
This incident took some Ethereum users by surprise, as user funds on the network were at risk as most of Ethereum's DeFi applications were down for several hours.
Infura then immediately updated their nodes to solve the problem. But as it turns out, an older version of Geth which contains a bug was "secretly" fixed by the Ethereum developers in the latest update.
Reporting from CoinDesk, this affected Ethereum users as well as other wallet providers because they did not have time to update their basic programming.
Because of the sudden two-way update, it has left critics and other stakeholders wondering about Ethereum's decentralization. Moreover, since the DAO hack on the Ethereum network in 2016, this issue has been hot again.
The Events Behind the Ethereum Hard Fork
In a follow-up report from Péter Szilágyi who is a senior on the Ethereum team, said that a fork "was (intentionally) triggered on the Ethereum network".
A representative from Optimism, an Ethereum scaling company, also mentioned that the project intentionally triggered a bug that led to the Geth update and triggered a hard fork.
This event created two versions of the transaction ledger on the Ethereum network. One, used with transactions under Geth which have been updated. Meanwhile, other versions will use the old Geth.
Quoted from CoinDesk, Nikita Zhavoronkov, lead developer at Blockchair said that this fix "even though it was done months ago, but only today the transaction caused a split." He also suspects that this was done on purpose to change Geth's existing consensus mechanism.
Ethereum Community Demands Transparency
Because it seems that it was done on purpose, many users of the Ethereum community demand transparency.
Moreover, many Ethereum stakeholders are confused because of the bug update process that was not discussed before.
Thesis founder, Matt Luongo, said
"(Should be) any major project that has close contact with the development team should have a security contact who can help manage and coordinate smooth upgrades, and we have to work together."
He also added that this could have an impact on the loss of funds in the network.
Ethereum 2.0 release
This problem is a hot issue among the crypto community, especially Ethereum because of concerns that the same thing will happen again on the Ethereum 2.0 network.
Luongo to CoinDesk
"I hope this fork will build even closer ties (going forward) and rethink how projects on Ethereum can communicate with client development."
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Soucore at coindesk for more details