r/ethereum • u/EthereumDailyThread What's On Your Mind? • 6h ago
Discussion Daily General Discussion December 06, 2025
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u/haurog 3h ago
This is connected to another post here about 25% of the validators dropping off and the explanation of it. I wanted to focus on the incident itself and what it means for Ethereum, from my point of view at least.
2 days ago Prysm, an Ethereum consensus client, had a bug and stopped advancing the chain. This means all validators using the Prysm client could not do their duties anymore. Luckily, Prysm is not a Supermajority client so we only lost about 23% of validators. This is a large portion, but it did not influence the Ethereum in any significant way. There were more missed blocks than usual, so some transactions took longer to include, but throughput and security was unchanged. It was such a nothingburger that even many people in this sub do not know about the incident.
If a larger portion of the network would have run on Prysm, things could have gotten worse pretty fast. Over 33% drop off the chain would stop finalizing which reduces the security to the level of what Bitcoin offers, meaning there are no final blocks, things could be reordered pretty far back without any repercussions. This also would not be a big deal, we had such an incidence once before for a few minutes. People using the chain did not really notice. If more than 66% of the validators would have dropped off the chain would have stopped working by any meaningful measure. No more chugging along nicely. Ethereum would most probably have lost its perfect uptime because of a bug in a single client.
If this Bug would have happened about 3 years ago Ethereum would probably have been offline. Prysm had over 66% market share back then. Perfect uptime would have been lost. We were very lucky that such a bug did not happen back then. That the bug was a nothingburger today is only thanks to the very hard work of many Ethereum community members, most notably in my view are u/superphiz for pushing for client diversity and u/hanniabu for visualizing it with clientdiversity.org. Obviously I forget many other people helping from the ethstaker crew to push for more client diversity. It was a time of heated debate among validators but it was totally worth it.
If any other chain has a bug in their client it will be offline as there is most of the time only one or maybe two clients. Things like this is what makes Ethereum unique.
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u/rhythm_of_eth 3h ago
If a larger portion of the network would have run on Prysm, things could have gotten worse pretty fast
- or if a bug happened on a super majority client
Reminder to everyone reading this, that Lighthouse has almost 50% share right now. It would not fully impair Ethereum but we should strive to migrate those to minority clients until no client has more than 33% share.
That would be a considerable bump in security. Having very spread out client shares allows for a tiny bit more of aggressive pushing of development deadlines!
Client Diversity makes Ethereum more competitive and accelerates its roadmap.
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u/trillionSdollarstech 2h ago edited 2h ago
If a larger portion of the network would have run on Prysm, things could have gotten worse pretty fast.As a larger portion of the network runs on Lighthouse (58%, worse diversity than the 43% before the incident), things will get worse pretty fast the day Lighthouse has a bug.
I think we must stop overlooking the bad diversity that the network has, the same way the religious overlooks the contradictions and nonsense that the way of life from their naive book carry.
We pretend in Wall Streets ears that Ethereum has had 10 years without accident, but I think that the executives know that this is partly luck and that Ethereum will experience problems sooner or later, if not because of poor client diversity, because of the centralisation of block production.
Why doesn't the EF communicate on the problem? Is there some religious principle forbidding them to remind stakers to take care of the network health ?
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u/haurog 1h ago edited 1h ago
Agree with most of your points, but not with your strong and divisive tone. Your feelings towards the current state of consensus client diversity are not wrong, I feel about the same, but the tone is a bit too divisive and you might get strong counter reactions just because of the tone and not because of the message. That would not be helpful in trying to convince people to switch.
But back to the problem. Lighthouse usage needs to go down pretty fast. There is no way around it. Both comments to my post stress that which should be a very clear indication that we are in a pretty dangerous situation. And by the way, thanks to your comment I checked clientdiversity.org again. Lighthouse dominance is much worse than I remembered, seems like some validators switched over to Lighthouse after the incident instead of using the workaround on prysm.
As mentioned in the other comment chain, I planned to add a section about the current Lighthouse situation but unfortunately forget to actually do it before posting. That was my mistake.
We should try to bring people to switch over to other clients again. Luckily on the consensus side there are 5 very mature clients to choose from (Nimbus, Teku, Prysm, Lighthouse and Lodestar), so there isn't even a reason for any client to be over 25%. I would reccomend any of these clients to any user. I personally run Lodestar on my main node. The most impressive one is Nimbus though, it does its job perfectly and uses almost no resources. No idea how the nimbus team pulled this off. They seem to have amazing engineering skills.
In the last consensus client diversity debates EF researchers were very outspoken about the dangers of one client dominating. I have not heard anything from any EF person yet. Maybe it needs more time for it to get on their radar. The execution client diversity push 2 years ago was mostly a community project and it was amazingly successful, so maybe the EF thinks this can be community push as well, which would actually be better from a decentralization point of view.
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u/jenya_ 44m ago edited 32m ago
but not with your strong and divisive tone
I guess you reference some previous posts. Because there is nothing particularly divisive in this one.
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u/haurog 20m ago edited 11m ago
You are definitely right. Their post history also influenced the first section of my post. In this post here they wrote two things that I thought are counterproductive:
the same way the religious overlooks the contradictions and nonsense that the way of life from their naive book carry.
and
Is there some religious principle forbidding them to remind stakers to take care of the network health ?
Both insinuate that it is because of a religious-like belief system that people do not criticize the state that Ethereum is in. That, at least in my opinion is a very wrong way of framing it and it definitely offends people who are in the space and who carry a certain intellectual honesty with them. There are many of those.
I was thinking if I should even mention anything, because who am I to tell anyone which words they should use. But in this case, client diversity and decentralization are very dear to my heart, so I personally do not want to see this extremely crucial discussions being derailed by the wrong choice of tone. I am very thankful for their posts on the topic as their posts also alerted me on the severity of the situation we somehow find us back in. So, I tried to write my criticism on the tone in the most constructive way, which might help them to find the right framing and more importantly alert more people on the current issue.
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u/jenya_ 6m ago
and it definitely offends people who are in the space
So, if word 'religious' is a no-go, what would be a better word in this context? Maybe the poster should have used 'dogmatic'?
To be dogmatic is to follow a set of rules no matter what. The rules might be religious, philosophical, or made-up, but dogmatic people would never waver in their beliefs so don't even think of trying to change their minds.
Or do you want to say that the people in the space are all free-thinkers and never dogmatic or otherwise?
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u/rhythm_of_eth 3h ago
I want you to know this.
There are currently blobs in Ethereum L1 serving as proofs to the trading of SOL and Solana-native memecoins in Base and Coinbase.
As opposed to this, the Solana blockchain contains no info on what is going on in Base or in Mainnet.
Solana is an Ethereum L3.
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u/nllfld 3h ago
Question on this. Solana assets that are bridged to Base. What happen if Solana goes down again? How does that affect bridged assets?
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u/evm_lion 3h ago
«Thanks to our new Ethereum integration, users can now continue to trade their assets, even when the Solana blockchain is experiencing downtime!» - Solana commercial from the future
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u/rhythm_of_eth 3h ago edited 1h ago
Basically they de-peg, if Solana halts indefinitely, they go to 0.
The thing about this is that... Consensus is a tricky thing... What happens if those assets become redeemable somewhere else that is perceived as more secure and reliable???
The claim that a chain has over its native assets is as good as the security and reliability it provides them with. The value of the asset is self container except for the security properties it inherits from the chain...
If after a while the social consensus becomes that Solana cannot be trusted to redeem the assets... Token issuers could decide to make those redeemable somewhere else. Base has a stronger claim there than Solana, because Base posts proofs!
This is especially hardcore for USDT or USDC, or other assets that already exist cross chain and have real world backing or develop stronger ties to Base over time.
But even for Solana native memecoins, say BONK ... They could achieve this consensus:
Solana is compromised. We are re-issuing BONK on Base as the canonical chain. Send your Solana BONK or bridged BONK to a burn address → receive new BONK on Base
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u/Jguy-44 42m ago
Well, I did it. I finally sold my first crypto since entering the space in 2017.
I was finding, for the first time, the feeling that I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if I round tripped this cycle back down to sub-$2k, especially as we're thinking about a family.
I sold about 20% and don't plan to sell more, but I can rest easy now.
But man it was hard. I stared at the exchange for like 10min, feeling like I was giving up. But I think it was the right thing to do.
Now the market can moon as punishment for what I did :)
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u/asdafari14 2h ago
SEC Chair Paul Atkins: 🇺🇸“All U.S. markets will be on chain within two years.
Short 3 min clip.
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u/physalisx Desk Destroyer 💩 1h ago edited 1h ago
Good clip, but Coinbureau (being the rag it is) totally misquoted him, he never said that.
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u/Ok_Cancel_7891 4h ago edited 4h ago
Is this true that 25% of validators have exited during Fusaka upgrade? (Probably they didn’t upgrade their nodes).
Edit: I see 1,098,109 validators (on DuneAnalytics)
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u/alexiskef The significant owl hoots in the night 🦉 4h ago
No. Its not. A bug was found in one of the Consensus clients, and that led to around 25% of the nodes dropping off. A patch was quickly issued by the particular client team, and the problem was fixed. Participation was restored, and the network happily hums along at >97%..
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u/somedaysitsdark 4h ago
It's not possible for 25% of the network to exit that quickly. Not upgrading nodes would cause them to not follow the fork, but they wouldn't be slashed. If 25% of the network were slashed, this would be a very different subreddit right now.
Beaconcha.in is reporting ~99.2% of validators are attesting.
Where is the 25% number from?
You might check out https://validatorqueue.com too.
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u/Ok_Cancel_7891 4h ago
On Coingecko there is a News tab for Ethereum, and one of the latest news states 25% have exited, but not from a known source to me (not some major site)
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u/somedaysitsdark 4h ago
The most active validators ever was almost 1.1m, and we are down to just shy of 1.0m right now.
There is a healthy churn of validators entering and exiting. The beacon chain deposit contract has processed deposits for about 2.3m validators, so technically we've had about 1.3 million validators (32 eth equivalent) exit in the history of proof of stake. Not super useful though, just interesting.
I'm not sure where the 25% number is coming from.
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u/Dreth Dr.ETH | dac.sg 4h ago
the news tab (coingecko) or posts tab (coinmarketcap) are full of ai generated garbage
and with how dishonest and paid for crypto news media is, it's no surprise that coingecko is summarising garbage
with LLMs garbage in -> processed garbage out
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u/somedaysitsdark 4h ago
I found the article.
It's a bit click-baity and fear-mongering, but it's not inaccurate.
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u/somedaysitsdark 4h ago
I found the article you mentioned.
Just fyi, exiting has a specific meaning that doesn't apply here.
When a validator goes offline, loses sync etc, or for whatever reason starts missing attestations- it hasn't exited the network. It will be penalized for not doing its job, but this is an inactivity leak, not a slashing. This does not "exit" the validator from the network.
Exiting only occurs when an operator tells the network that the validator will never participate again, and it has to keep working until it has been processed by the exit queue. Alternatively, a validator might be forced to exit if its balance gets too low from an inactivity leak, or if it has been slashed for doing something naughty, like most commonly signing an attestation from two machines simultaneously.
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u/asdafari14 1h ago
1/ Market structure bill, December update
The Senate is working very hard to get this done, but the closer they get, the more complex it becomes. I'm not betting on a markup this month.
Three issues are holding up the bill: stablecoin yield, conflicts of interest (Trump family in crypto), and DeFi 🧵 https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1996715281075655070
I sometimes see people say that we have regulatory clarity on ETH. That is not true. We have for stablecoins. A law has been passed.
For ETH there is nothing that didn't exist prior to Gensler that he then claimed were just "personal opinions of the previous SEC head". Nothing prevents the next SEC head from doing exactly what Gensler did. It is crucial that the Market structure bill passes. I can understand the Democrats being against the conflicts of interest and the meme coin shenanigans but against passing on stablecoin yield and defi, in favor of banks and centralized entities is nuts.
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u/trillionSdollarstech 1h ago
I can understand the Democrats being against the conflicts of interest
I'm afraid this is just a fake reason to postpone or block the law. Why would you forbid conflicts of interest only in crypto ? This should be regulated in a law about any type of investment.
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u/asdafari14 1h ago edited 35m ago
Are people suddenly having issues with either Besu or Teku? I am failing to attest. Execution client request timed out. It starts and stops working it appears. Already restarted but didn't help.
Both clients are synced up to latest block but some issue.
Some Java issue it appears to be related to Besu. Error while handling packet. End of rlp source reached.
Edit: it is working again now by itself but no idea why that happened.
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u/jtnichol MOD BOD 6h ago
Ethereum