Odaily Planet Daily reports that Cointelegraph monitored a sharp decline in validator participation in the Ethereum network shortly after the Fusaka network upgrade due to a bug in the Prysm consensus client, with a large number of voting nodes going offline.
Prysm officially announced on Thursday that its v7.0.0 client unnecessarily generated old states when handling outdated Attestations, causing nodes to malfunction. Developers recommend users temporarily start the client with the "--disable-last-epoch-targets" flag as a workaround.
Data from Beaconcha.in shows that in Epoch 411,448, the network's sync participation and voting participation have dropped to 75% and 74.7%, respectively. The voting participation decreased by 25%, falling less than 9 percentage points short of the two-thirds majority (66.6%) required for the network to maintain finality.
The decline in voting participation this time is roughly consistent with the share of validators using the Prysm consensus client, indicating that Attestation failures are likely concentrated among Prysm validators. Previously, Prysm's share had once reached as high as 68.1%.
As of the time of publication, the Ethereum network's current Epoch (411,712) voting participation is close to 99%, with synchronized participation reaching 97%, indicating that the network has recovered. Current MigaLabs data shows that Lighthouse still accounts for 52.55% of consensus nodes, with Prysm in second place at 18%. Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano stated that if this Bug occurs in Lighthouse, the network will lose finality.
