An update in the OpenEthereum client, the community successor of the Parity client for Ethereum, made the nodes running on the new version essentially useless. The bug appears to have been introduced in the 2.7.2 version of OpenEthereum, upon which the subsequent 3.0 update was based as well. Though the 2.7 release was marked as stable, since June the community started reporting about the client occasionally freezing, which required a manual hard restart for the node. The issue appears randomly “one or three times a month,” and the software fails to notify of its malfunction. Some users have decreed the …
Research into stateless clients for Ethereum is seen as instrumental for the long-term health of the network, but despite all the progress, some fundamental limitations prevent them from being applied in practice for now. At the Unitize conference, Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, provided an up-to-date picture on the latest progress and problems for the stateless client transition. Stateless clients, in short, are a way to allow nodes to fully participate in validation without having to hold the entire earlier history of the blockchain. The state represents all current balances, smart contracts code and their respective data. Each new …
Staking infrastructure provider Staked said it had learned “an expensive lesson” after 75 of its Eth2 validators were slashed on Feb. 4 from the staking pool as punishment for producing competing blocks. In a statement, Staked took the blame for the “technical issue” and said its customers would be “fully compensated”. The company will pay the penalty of 18 ETH, which is around $29,000 at current prices. An unanticipated reaction to configuration changes caused several nodes managed by Staked to restart in error, leading them to incorrectly sign a second version of a previously-signed block. This introduced the potential for …
Ankr, one of the industry’s fastest RPC providers and web3 developer toolsets, has announced that it will become a remote procedure call provider for Optimism. Optimism is an open-source layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum that focuses on speed and efficient transactions across the network. It has caught the eyes of many in recent months, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. This is a great example of why I'm so proud of @optimismPBC for adding non-token governance (the Citizen House). Optimism explicitly has goals *other* than just "make OP go up", and the only way to do that long-term is with explicit …
The digital financial environment continues to develop almost every second, which is no surprise to those in the crypto sector. Among such technological advancements, a new project called StrongBlock has popularized the concept of the node as a service (NaaS) on the blockchain. NaaS is an alternative to running entire blockchain nodes on your own; it provides developer infrastructure and tools for setting up and managing blockchain nodes. Connected blockchain nodes relay, transmit and store decentralized blockchain data. But, what is a blockchain node? A node, also known as a Full Node, is a device that stores the blockchain's whole …