Ethereum Pectra Upgrade faced yet another issue due to a mysterious attacker.
The unknown attacker started sending zero-token transfers, leading to empty block mining. Ethereum has been known for its weak market performance for the past several months. Even though the Pectra upgrade brought some hopes to improve the network, its implementation is not going as per initial schedule. An unknown attacker exploited the upgrade on Sepolia mainnet recently. This further delayed the Pectra upgrade launch on the mainnet.
What Happened to the Pectra Upgrade on Sepolia?
The news came to light when one of the Ethereum developers, Marius Van Der Wijden, published a report on the issue. When the Pectra upgrade went live on March 5, developers started noticing error messages and the creation of empty blocks. This issue arose when the deposit contract emitted an unexpected transfer event. It was supposed to create a deposit event instead of a transfer event.
The Geth team came up with a fix to ignore all erroneous logs coming from the deposit contract. However, there was an edge case in the ERC-20 standard which was overlooked by developers. The attacker exploited this and sent zero-token transfers to the deposit contract. As a result, the network continued to mine empty blocks. After the developers coordinated and rolled out a private fix, nodes resumed producing full blocks on the network.
When Will the Pectra Upgrade Rolls Out?
During the entire process, the Ethereum mainnet didn’t get disturbed and it never lost finalization. This issue was only limited to the Sepolia Network. The difference between deposit contracts of Ethereum mainnet and the Sepolia network is the reason behind this.
Even though the Pectra upgrade on Sepolia successfully came out from the attack, it further delayed the launch process. The developers decided to take some more time for testing and debugging before launching the upgrade on the mainnet.
Meanwhile, 600K Ethereum was withdrawn from exchanges for the last 7 days. Ether market price dropped over 10% this week and is further trending downward today.
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