Ethereum Beacon Chain has experienced the longest blockchain reorganization in recent years

Beacon Chain Ethereum, which will be crucial for the merger Ethereum today faced with a potentially high level of security risk, known as the “reorganization” of the blockchain.

A reorganization can occur either because of a network failure, such as an error, or because of a malicious attack that temporarily results in a duplicate version. blockchain. The longer the reorganization lasts, the more serious the consequences.

According to Martin Köppelmann, CEO and co-founder of the service provider DeFi Gnosis, today’s reorganization of the Ethereum Beacon Chain lasted seven blocks – this is the longest such reorganization in recent years.

Beacon Chain, launched on December 1, 2020, introduced its own staking on the Ethereum blockchain. The rate, which involves the transfer of assets to the network, is how validators gain the right to add blocks to the chain, which is the basic principle of the model. Consensus Proof-of- Stake.

Köppelmann mentioned today’s reorganization of Ethereum on the Twitter thread, saying it suggests that there is still a lot of work to be done before the merger.

“This shows that the current node attestation strategy needs to be revised to hopefully have a more stable chain,” he wrote.

Reorganization occurs when two different miners at the same time, they begin to work on adding blocks of transactions with the same complexity to the chain. This creates Fork or a duplicate version of the blockchain.

The miner adding the next block must choose which side of the branch is the correct or canonical chain. Once they do, the other will be lost.

The seven-block reorganization means that seven-block transactions were added to the fork that was eventually removed before the network decided it was not a canonical chain. According to Etherscan.io, each block in the Ethereum chain contains approximately 200 to 300 transactions and has a value of about 2 ETH or approximately $ 4,000.

When there are two competing versions of the blockchain, even if only briefly, there is a risk that someone will be able to spend the same assets twice.

When this is done maliciously, as in the case of the ZenGo wallet attack in 2020, it is called a double spending attack. In such an attack, fraudsters send a transaction with a minimum commission, and then immediately cancel it, increasing the commission (so that miners are interested in checking a more profitable new transaction first) and redirecting funds to another address.

But in this case, the reason for the reorganization and the potential for double spending seems to have been innocuous.

The software that miners use has a method of determining which side of the branching to choose – this is the attestation strategy that Köppelmann talked about.

The Twitter topic eventually caught the attention of some of Ethereum’s core developers. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin himself intervened to give weight to the theory that the problem was caused by miners using outdated versions of the software for mining.

It was timely response.

Last year, Buterin and Georgios Konstantinopoulos, Paradigm’s chief technology officer, addressed the issue of the reorganization on their blog. It said that a reorg of more than five blocks could be a sign of a malicious attack.

They explained that short single-block and two-block reorganizations occur all the time due to network latency.

“Sometimes failure can lead to a reorganization of 2-5 blocks,” Buterin and Konstantinopoulos wrote in their post. “Reorganizations longer than this almost always occur due to a major network failure, customer error, or malicious attacks.”

But as Prysm developer Terrence Cao explained on Twitter, today’s reorganization, while long enough to raise serious concerns, could have been just another case of failure.