Ethereum Prysm client bug causes validator participation to drop by 25%, risking finality

Cointelegraph monitored that shortly after the Fusaka network upgrade, the participation of validators in the Ethereum network sharply declined due to a bug in the Prysm consensus client, resulting in a large number of voting nodes going offline.

Prysm officially announced on Thursday that its v7.0 version client unnecessarily generated old states when processing outdated attestations, causing nodes to malfunction. Developers recommended that users temporarily start the client with the "--disable-last-epoch-targets" flag as a workaround.

Data from Beaconcha.in shows that in Epoch 411,448, the network's sync participation and voting participation dropped to 75% and 74.7%, respectively. The voting participation decreased by 25%, falling just under 9 percentage points short of the two-thirds majority (66.6%) required for the network to maintain finality.

The extent of the decline in voting participation roughly corresponds with the share of validators using the Prysm consensus client, indicating that the failures in attestations are likely concentrated among Prysm validators. Previously, Prysm's share had reached as high as 68.1%. As of the time of writing, the current voting participation in the Ethereum network's Epoch (411,712) is nearly 99%, with sync participation at 97%, indicating that the network has recovered.

Current data from MigaLabs shows that Lighthouse still accounts for 52.55% of consensus nodes, with Prysm in second place at 18%. Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano stated that if Lighthouse encountered this bug, the network would lose finality.