Ethereum Suffers from Unintended ‘Chain Split,’ Few Third-Party Services ‘Got Stuck on Minority Chain’

According to a number of third party infrastructure providers, the Ethereum blockchain suffered an unintended hard fork or chain split on Wednesday. The service providers Infura, Binance, and Blockchair all reported issues with consensus at block height 11,234,873.

• The cryptocurrency community has been discussing an unintended chain split that took place on the Ethereum blockchain on Wednesday, November 11, 2020.
• Three major third-party service providers Infra, Binance, and Blockchair all reported on the issues with Ethereum at around 5 a.m. (EST).
• A number of cryptocurrency community members and Ethereum supporters complained about network issues on Wednesday morning. The issue seems to be minor and resolving at the time of writing.
• “There was a possible ETH chain split at block 11234873,” tweeted Changpeng Zhao (CZ) the CEO of Binance. “Etherscan and Blockchair are showing two different chains and data after this block. We’re resolving now but have temporarily closed withdrawals. Funds are SAFU,” the exchange operator added.

• Blockchair CEO Nikita Zhavoronkov also tweeted about the incident in a thread that explained the situation with Ethereum. “At some point, Ethereum developers introduced a change in the code that led today to a chain split starting from block 11234873 (07:08 UTC),” Zhavoronkov said. “Those who haven’t upgraded (Blockchair, Infura, some miners, and many others) got stuck on a minority chain (~30 blocks in 2 hours). Technically, that was an unannounced hard fork,” he added.

Ethereum-dependent services are facing outages following the recent chain split. ETH withdrawals from Nash trading channels are currently failing, but we’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

— Nash (@nashsocial) November 11, 2020

• The infrastructure provider Infura also gave details about the incident on the organization’s web portal. “The root cause was traced to several components within our infrastructure which were locked to an older stable version of the go-ethereum client which encountered a critical consensus bug at block 11234873,” Infura noted. “This affected several Geth versions including 1.9.9 and 1.9.13. Components running 1.9.19 and later were unaffected. A full post-mortem will be completed and shared after the incident is resolved.”

• A number of exchanges including Binance halted withdrawals temporarily. Some users complained about oracle and price feed delays. A number of Ethereum users discussed issues with ETH-based price feeds and ERC20 tokens while using wallets like Metamask.
• Ethereum Foundation member, Péter Szilágyi responded to Zhavoronkov’s analysis and said: “Technically you are correct that it was an “unannounced hard fork” (from a bad chain to the good one). That said, silently fixing a bug dormant for 2+ years has a much lower chance of causing a disruption than raising awareness to it. We strive to minimize potential damage.”
• At the time of publication, the price of Ethereum (ETH) is still up over 3% on Wednesday and swapping for $460 per coin.

What do you think about the issues the Ethereum network experienced today? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

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