Early on a Tuesday morning, Ethereum core developers launched Bellatrix, the final major upgrade before the network’s long-awaited merge. However, others have questioned the network’s readiness for the upgrade due to some early technical issues.
Ethereum merge is an upgrade that transitions the network to a more energy-efficient proof-of-stake blockchain as the Ethereum beacon chain is combined with its mainnet.
Bellatrix, an upgrade that starts the merge on the backend of beacon chain, consensus layer, was successfully launched by the Ethereum developers today.
The execution layer of the network will also undergo another upgrade the following week, tweaking how ETH is generated and validated for all users around the world.
Developers celebrated the Bellatrix’s successful execution after the upgrade went live, and announced that they would immediately move forward with the final execution layer upgrade of the merge, Paris.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently scheduled the launch of Paris upgrade to roughly September 13 to 15.
However, there were some indications that Bellatrix may not have been successful as the initial execution.
Since the launch of Bellatrix, the Ethereum network experienced a huge increase in its “missed block rate” — which is the frequency of the network failing to verify a block of transactions scheduled for validation.
The network normally fail to verify 0.5% of all blocks on its first attempt. With Bellatrix, over 9% of the block faced that problem.
It turns out that the readiness of the network’s node operators may be the cause behind this trouble.
All of the node operators — including individuals and organizations that maintain the operation of the network’s backend and infrastructure — must update their clients to the most recent, merge-ready software.
According to the Ethereum Foundation, any operators who do not update by then will be “be stuck on an incompatible chain following the old rules and will be unable to send Ether or operate on the post-merge Ethereum network” if and when the merge is launched next week.
Several Ethereum network core developers claimed that operators who hadn’t yet carried out this software upgrade were the reason for the spike in missed block rate.
According to Marius Van Der Wijden, one of the Ethereum core developers, the nodes’ inactivity leaks will occur if they’re not updated.
This means that the more node operators who have yet to upgrade their software, the greater the likelihood that the proof-of-stake chain would experience missed blocks. 25.2% of Ethereum nodes, according to Ethernodes, have not yet upgraded their software.
Ethereum’s core developers have been focused on the process of persuading all node operators to update their software in the lead-up to the market for months. Van Der Wijden added that the main issue right now is that the users need to be heavily informed.
