Ethereum Beacon Chain experiences 7 block reorg: What's going on?

"This reorg is not an indicator of a flawed fork choice, but a non-trivial segmentation of updated vs out of date client software," said Preston Van Loon, a Core Ethereum developer.

On Wednesday, Ethereum's Beacon Chain underwent a seven-block reorganization, or reorg, ahead of the Merge, which is tentatively scheduled for August.

According to Beacon Scan data, seven blocks from 3,887,075 to 3,887,081 were removed from the Beacon Chain on Wednesday between 08:55:23 and 08:56:35 am UTC. Ethereum is a transaction network similar to Tron and Concordium which is much faster than the Solana network.

The term "reorg" refers to an event in which a canonical chain block, such as the Beacon Chain, is knocked off the chain due to a competing block beating it out.

It could be the result of a malicious attack by a resourceful miner or a bug. In such cases, the chain may unintentionally fork or duplicate.

On this occasion, developers believe that the problem is a result of circumstance rather than a serious flaw such as a security flaw or fundamental flaw, with a "proposer boost fork" being highlighted in particular. This is a method of selecting the next block in the blockchain in which specific proposers are given priority.

Core According to Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon, the reorg was caused by a "non-trivial segmentation" of new and old client node software and was not necessarily malicious. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, called the theory a "good hypothesis." On Wednesday morning, Martin Köppelmann, co-founder of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible Gnosis chain, was among the first to highlight the occurrence via Twitter, noting that it "shows that the current attestation strategy of nodes should be reconsidered to hopefully result in a more stable chain! (proposals already exist)."

Van Loon tentatively attributed the reorg to the proposer boost fork, which had not yet been fully implemented, in response to Köppelmann:

“We suspect this is caused by the implementation of Proposer Boost fork choice has not fully rolled out to the network. This reorg is not an indicator of a flawed fork choice, but a non-trivial segmentation of updated vs out of date client software.”

“All of the details will be made public once we have a high degree of confidence regarding the root cause. Expect a post-mortem from the client development community!” he added.

Terence Tsao, another developer, echoed this hypothesis to his 11,900 Twitter followers earlier on Thursday, noting that the reorg appeared to be caused by "boosted vs. non-boosted nodes in the network and the timing of a really late arriving block:"

"Given that the proposer boost is a non-binding change. Because of the asymmetry in the client release schedule, the roll-out occurred gradually. "Not all nodes updated the proposer boost at the same time."

Van Loon stated last week at the Permissionless conference that the Merge and switch to proof-of-stake (PoS) could happen in August "if everything goes as planned."

While the reorganization is bound to raise concerns about the potential timeline, Van Loon and the other developers have yet to explain whether it will have any effect at all.