Paradigm chief technological officer Georgios Konstantopoulos has disclosed a bug in the firm’s Ethereum execution client Reth. In a post on X, Konstantopoulos stated that the bug is causing several nodes to stall while offering a solution to the problem.
According to Konstantopoulos, users can fix the issue by running a set of commands that will get them past the bug without causing any major impact on their operations. He added that the fix would take about 45 minutes to complete, but he noted that the incident remains under investigation.
He said:
“We are still investigating root cause, but the above gets you past the issue. This is safe to run on both pruned & archive nodes, won’t lose you any RPC information, and will take ~45m to rebuild the trie before it continues syncing.”
The bug was in the state root computation for Reth, which meant the client could not validate new blocks, effectively failing to synchronize with the Ethereum network. According to Paradigm, the issue reared its head at block 2327426 and affected Ethereum mainnet versions 1.6.0 and 1.4.8.
Reth is a client on the Ethereum mainnet, which was built using the Rust language. Like other execution clients, including Geth, Nethermind, Go-ethereum, and others, it is responsible for running smart contracts and transactions on the mainnet.
Meanwhile, Konstantopoulos described the incident as a brutal moment for the crypto research firm while adding that it will also serve as a learning curve. Paradigm has been pushing for accelerated development on Ethereum and presents its Reth client as a software development kit for building EVM-core nodes in a post earlier this year.
Ethereum community says the incident shows the need for client diversity
Interestingly, the incident has also ignited conversations around Ethereum client diversity and decentralization. The Paradigm-built Reth is the newest execution client on Ethereum and is one of the least used, with only 5.4% of Ethereum execution clients using it.
This meant that the incident did not have much impact on Ethereum’s general functionality as the network continued to produce blocks. Many users have now pointed to this to show the importance of client diversity on Ethereum.
According to Ethernode, Ethereum has six known execution layer clients. Geth has the biggest market share at 48.2%, followed by Nethermind at 16.9%. Go-ethereum also has 15.17% while Besu and Erigon have 7.1% and 6.2%.
The diversity in execution clients also exists with consensus layer clients on Ethereum. Lighthouse controls the majority with 46.1% while Prysm has 24.8%. Other clients, such as Teku, Nimbus, and Lodestar, have market shares varying between 12.2% and 2.1%.
Despite the variety of clients available, there are still concerns that one client each for the execution and consensus layers has more than 33% of the market share. The concerns revolve around the risks of chain disruption and financial loss for node operators because it only takes 2/3 of validators to reach finality.
Ethereum price declines slightly
While the incident did not affect Ethereum network operations, ETH did see a decline in value over the last 24 hours, falling by around 1% to below $4,400. The price drop means Ether has dropped more than 5% in the last seven days.
ETH’s struggle appears to be mostly tied to a price correction and consolidation similar to what the broader market is experiencing over the past week, suggesting that the token could see a rebound in value soon.
Signs of that are already evident, with 500,000 ETH worth over $2 billion withdrawn from centralized exchanges in the past week.
This implies that the token remains very much in the accumulation phase, especially with institutional demand remaining very high. Last week, spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) recorded inflows of over 286,000 ETH, marking one of their biggest weeks.
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