Ethereum 2.0 testnet goes offline

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The ETH 2.0 testnet ‘Medalla’ came to a grinding halt due to a time-bug that took a majority of testnet validators offline. This is the first instance of the network coming to a stop. Although Ethereum has experienced bottlenecks in the past, it has never come to a full stop like it did due to the testnet time-bug.

The Ethereum testnet bug

The bug that brought the Ethereum 2.0 testnet offline was time-related and affected everyone using the Prysm client–which a majority of ETH 2.0 testnet validators were using. According to the official report from the Prysm Labs team:

“The cloudflare roughtime servers all returned wrong information, and Prysm nodes did not properly fallback from this situation. This bug caused all Prysm nodes to exhibit clock skew. Because of this clock skew, validators incorrectly proposed blocks and attestations for future slots.”

As a result, the percentage of individuals successfully validating blocks on the ETH 2.0 testnet dropped from 75% to 5%, and people could no longer process blocks or receive block rewards, and receive transaction fees. In other words, the Ethereum 2.0 testnet effectively went offline, and Prysm labs has not implemented a fix for their Medalla client yet.

What does this tell us?

Ethereum 2.0 is not ready to launch. Regardless of there being 5 clients that individuals can use to validate blocks on the ETH 2.0 testnet, a majority of the validators were using Prysm. This had the unfortunate consequence of crashing the network since a majority of the validators were relying on one faulty client. That being said, you can expect significant delays in the launch of ETH 2.0.

The problem with Ethereum

To add insult to injury, Ethereum is facing many problems beyond the crash of its 2.0 testnet. 

Ethereum has officially hit ALL TIME HIGH on transaction fees. Its scalability woes are affecting the number of transactions the blockchain can process and spiking fees.
This in turn affects every token operating on the blockchain.

Currently averaging almost $7 USD/transaction! pic.twitter.com/TxuKZsyP2Z

— Eli Afram (@justicemate) August 14, 2020

Recently, Ethereums transaction fees reached an all-time high thanks to the popularity of DeFi platforms, which are both driving transaction fees on Ethereum up and inching the network closer to bottleneck. This tells us a lot about Ethereum. It has been 5 years since Ethereum launched and the platform struggles from issues that should have been solved before it launched. It’s not possible to build a serious business on Ethereum because its network can’t scale, it has more expensive transaction fees than using fiat, and has extremely low transaction throughput. 

Ethereum protocol developers know ETH has major issues and the roadmap consists of years of additional protocol development in an attempt to upgrade to ETH 2.0. The only public blockchain that allows you to build a business right now that will persist into the future is Bitcoin (BSV). Unlike Ethereum, the Bitcoin protocol is set in stone. This gives businesses and software developers peace of mind knowing that the platforms and services they build today will be valid on the chain in the future and will not become obsolete due to a future software upgrade by protocol developers.

In addition, the fees on Bitcoin are stable and are only a fraction of a penny, $.0002, compared to the average tx fee on Ethereum which is currently $2.97. Using Bitcoin lets businesses reduce their costs as well as payment settlement time since BSV transactions are settled nearly instantaneously–these benefits are not attainable on Ethereum.

No real businesses can be created atop of Ethereum, it is nothing more than a hobby platform. Smart projects are turning to Bitcoin SV in order to insure their ideas get built by them instead of having someone else steal their idea but implement it on the only viable blockchain for the future.