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.