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Ethereum upgrades pose testing challenges, says Sprinter co-founder
Greg Markou has a warning for anyone who assumes Ethereum upgrades go smoothly because they passed a testnet: they often don’t.
The co-founder and CEO of Sprinter says upgrades to the network are hard to test and can break a large number of applications without warning. He speaks from experience, having been in the room the last time it happened.
His comments came during a public discussion among developers about the realities of shipping protocol changes on the world’s busiest smart contract platform. His central point was blunt. Testnets help, but they cannot account for every edge case that might trip up apps running on the live network.
A London hard fork war story
Markou’s credibility on this topic comes from a specific incident. He was the maintainer of web3.js during the EIP-1559 upgrade, which shipped as part of the London hard fork in August 2021.
For the uninitiated, web3.js is a JavaScript library that lets apps communicate with the Ethereum blockchain. Think of it as the translator sitting between a website and the network itself.
A hard fork, meanwhile, is a change to Ethereum’s core rules that the network adopts as a whole. Every node has to follow the new rules, which means any software built on the old assumptions can suddenly find itself out of step.
According to Markou, an update tied to that upgrade had consequences nobody saw coming. Nearly every application that relied on web3.js was affected.
The culprit was an invariant involving MetaMask that went undetected. An invariant is a condition that developers assume will always hold true. When one of those assumptions quietly stops being true, everything built on top of it can wobble.
Markou described Ethereum as an “absolute monolithic beast.”
It is a vivid description, and not an affectionate one. The point is that the system has grown so large and interconnected that predicting how a single change ripples outward is genuinely difficult.#Write2Earn #ETH $ETH
Ethereum upgrades pose testing challenges, says Sprinter co-founder
Greg Markou has a warning for anyone who assumes Ethereum upgrades go smoothly because they passed a testnet: they often don’t.
The co-founder and CEO of Sprinter says upgrades to the network are hard to test and can break a large number of applications without warning. He speaks from experience, having been in the room the last time it happened.
His comments came during a public discussion among developers about the realities of shipping protocol changes on the world’s busiest smart contract platform. His central point was blunt. Testnets help, but they cannot account for every edge case that might trip up apps running on the live network.
A London hard fork war story
Markou’s credibility on this topic comes from a specific incident. He was the maintainer of web3.js during the EIP-1559 upgrade, which shipped as part of the London hard fork in August 2021.
For the uninitiated, web3.js is a JavaScript library that lets apps communicate with the Ethereum blockchain. Think of it as the translator sitting between a website and the network itself.
A hard fork, meanwhile, is a change to Ethereum’s core rules that the network adopts as a whole. Every node has to follow the new rules, which means any software built on the old assumptions can suddenly find itself out of step.
According to Markou, an update tied to that upgrade had consequences nobody saw coming. Nearly every application that relied on web3.js was affected.
The culprit was an invariant involving MetaMask that went undetected. An invariant is a condition that developers assume will always hold true. When one of those assumptions quietly stops being true, everything built on top of it can wobble.
Markou described Ethereum as an “absolute monolithic beast.”
It is a vivid description, and not an affectionate one. The point is that the system has grown so large and interconnected that predicting how a single change ripples outward is genuinely difficult.#Write2Earn #ETH $ETH
