Ethereum Developers Fix Bugs Two Weeks Before The London Upgrade

Ethereum’s lead developer Tim Beiko shed some light on the forthcoming “London” Ethereum network update in the ‘London Testnet Retrospective’ document.

In the report, Beiko noted that the team encountered a problem with the OpenEthereum client, which saw its node has stopped progressing on Ethereum’s Ropsten testnet. According to the log of the issue, the culprit was the go-ethereum protocol and Geth client which checked the balance of the transaction sender for 1559-style transactions, rather than the OpenEthereum client.

The issue occurred on Ropsten’s Block 1067953. Ethereum’s R&D team saw Besu and go-ethereum reach past Block 1067953, with Nethermind joining them later. It turns out the root cause is within the go-ethereum node, which validated the block.

“Specifically, OpenEthereum and Besu rejected the transaction/block, while Nethermind, go-ethereum, and Erigon accepted them,” Beiko commented.

The problem lies within the caused confusion, as some client teams used the full “sender.balance assertion” (i.e. pre-subtraction of transactiion.amount) when checking the assertion defined on code line 217, rather than the updated value.

The development team suggested a quick fix - to move this assertion closer to when the signer.balance value is updated, similarly to the other assertion on line 208 in the code.

Shortly after the problem, Ethereum’s R&D department released a bug fix for all miner platforms, which mitigates the confusion in the underlying source code.

Meanwhile, the crypto community is eagerly waiting for EIP-1559, also known as the London upgrade. The network overhaul is scheduled for August 4, 2021, and will bring a burning gas fees algorithm, after changing the current auction mechanism.

Also, Ethereum would introduce a discrete “base fee” for transactions to be included in the next block. Prioritizing transactions can happen via adding a “tip” to speed things up a little. Delaying the network difficulty bomb until December, as a part of EIP-3554, which will also be included in the London hard fork.

The price per Ethereum token, meanwhile, bounced back from its weekly low of $1,722.05. As of press time, the altcoin leader is in a fierce battle for the $2,000 milestone price level, despite the fear that ETH prices would dump to $1,559 before the London deployment.

The five percent daily price increase comes with a 20% spike in trading volumes, which would most certainly keep the momentum for the second-largest crypto to date going in the green.

However, Ethereum is still 54% down from its mid-May all-time high, which may be pivotal in Ethereum’s transition to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, scheduled for next year.