Good news ( or bad news, depending on your take on the facts), the Ethereum 2.0's Medalla testnet is finally back online after a synchronization error brought down the network on August 14. The Testnet node participation rates is much lower than before, roughly 70% of pre-crash levels. From the official channels, we found out that it was a Cloudflare outage that affected node synchronization, which in turn prevented the nodes from validating blocks and processing transactions. There are two dominant network clients called called Lighthouse and Prysm. The issue is that you need much more network clients to keep the network running in case some of them are failing. Because of this issue (2 clients being bominant, Prysm being faulty), on August 15-16 they lost all the network participants (the network crashed when the participation was under 5 %).
Let's see what happen?The problem with the Prysm client was that, at some moment, jumped 4-5 hours in the future and started to add blocks to an inexistent blockchain. This happened because they were in sync with the Cloudflare Roughtime, and for one hour, for unknown reasons, the Roughtime time service provided a clock sync that has added extra 4 hours. Then they readjusted, and everything was fine until the real time catched-up with the 4 hours interval. They were dealing with contradictory attestations, nodes coming out of nowhere, being overlapped, and unjustified high levels of resources usage on Lighthouse and Teku clients. In 24 hours, everything went South. What is important is that the beacon chain was not broken, and the lessons learned from this event are the following (at least in my opinion):
1. At least 4 network clients are needed, none having more than 30% dominance. The issue was that they quickly lost up to 80% of the validators, while everything under 50% could have been mamageable.
2. Lesson 2: do not relay on third party services, as this is so often a major vulnerability.
At the moment there is a diversity of network clients - Teku (Somer Esat), Nimbus (CoinCashew), Lighthouse (larrypc), oand Lodestar (CoinCashew) being used along with Prysm. And what we can say, we can be only glad that this happened on the testnet, as this is their role, to test. A flawlessly run is usually a red flag, and this happening in a controlled environment made it easily to contain and to improve the code.
That was the today story, enjoy the rest of your day!
G.
My crypto-related links (check ratings - 1 to 5 stars based on my personal experience)
Games to gain crypto
***** League of Kingdoms - link here: similar with Heroes of Might and Magic or RoK (worldwide - paying in DAI)
***** DogeWars - link here (paying in Doge, 10-100 Doge initial investment, fight bosses and 1vs1 arena)
Exchanges
***** Binance( good for staking/savings ) - link here
***** Kucoin( good for staking/savings ) - link here
***** Coinbase( ideal for beginners )- link here
****ChangeNOW (make your own exchange widget) - link here
Investments
**** BlockFi (decent interest rates, but less choices than Celsius) - link here
***** Celsius.network (good rates of interests and monthly codes for free crypto, 1235256530 => my referral for $10 bonus ) - link here
**** Coinbundle (investing in crypto bundles) - link here
**** Stakecube (staking, masternodes and very easy to claim faucets for 28 coins/tokens) - link here
Wallets for multiple cryptocurrencies
***** Coinpot - link here (microwallet for all Moon faucets, Bitfun and Bonusbitcoin)
***** Atomic wallet - link here (microwallet for Publish0x DAI, BAT and Loopring)
***** Sphere wallet (for Horizen, combined with the faucet for extra bonus) - link here
**** Crypto.com wallet (good interest staking and 50$ bonus in MCO) - link here
Free crypto (faucets and more)
***** Pipeflare faucet (ZEC & PIVX) - link here
****Lbry.tv (free crypto for watching or making videos) - link here
****Bitfun( 3 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here
****Bonusbitcoin( 15 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here
****Moon Bitcoin ( 5 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here
***Moon Bitcoin Cash ( 5 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here
****Moon Litecoin ( 5 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here
****Moon Dogecoin ( 5 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here
***Moon Dash ( 5 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here
***** Horizen faucet ( 20 hours countdown - automatically deposit to Sphere wallet - bonus ) - link here
***** Zcash daily faucet (20 hours cooldown - automatically deposit to Binance- bonus) - link here
*** Tezos faucet ( 7 days countdown - automatically deposit to Coinbase or Binance wallet ) - link here
** Tron and other crypto faucet (24 hours countdown) - link here
Others
***** Publish0x blog (Free BAT, DAI and Loopring for reading/writing - can combine with Atomic wallet) - link here
***** Brave browser (Free BAT for using it, based on paid ads, very good AdBlocker and high speed) - link here
***** Presearch search engine (Free PRE for using it, works well in combination with Brave browser) - link here
Disclaimer: This text also can be re-published on my personal blogs, such as this one.
