Nethermind, an Ethereum infrastructure firm, has fixed a “critical” bug in several versions of its execution client that was reportedly causing users to fail to process blocks on Ethereum.
While the incident impacted users of Nethermind, a minority client, some Ethereum community members emphasized the importance of diversifying away from Geth, the majority client.
According to a post on Nethermind’s GitHub account on January 21, the most recent hotfix addresses a consensus issue in Nethermind that was introduced in version 1.23.0.
Nethermind’s co-chief technology officer, Daniel Cadela, confirmed that versions 1.23-1.25 were affected and advised node validators to update to version 1.25.2. In his follow-up post, Cadela described the bug as “critical”.
First to report that their Nethermind execution client was no longer processing blocks, GitHub user “wga22” brought attention to the problem.
The new version 1.25.2 was released approximately 2.5 hours after the firm’s technical lead, Lukasz Rozmej, stated that the company was investigating the issue.
At first glance, Ethereum advocates Superphiz dismissed the dilemma as “no big deal” as long as the consensus issue affected only minority clients.
Superphiz continued, “In actuality, it’s a very deliberate design decision not to rely on any single point of failure.”
However, several members of the Ethereum community argued that the situation could have been much worse if the issue had occurred in Geth, which currently accounts for 84% of Ethereum’s execution clients.
“Today’s beacon chain hiccup has once again highlighted the importance of EL client diversity,” said Ethereum advocate “daddysether” in a post on January 21.
“Switch to a minority client, and help keep Ethereum secure!” they went on to say.
According to data, Nethermind currently accounts for only 8.2% of all Ethereum execution clients.
However, in August, Ethereum bull Anthony Sassano shared a screenshot that showed much greater execution client diversity, with Geth and Nethermind accounting for 48% and 26%, respectively.
“Client diversity is one of the Ethereum ecosystem’s greatest achievements,” Sassano stated at the time.
The increased reliance on Geth has some members of the Ethereum community concerned.
“Nothing against Geth (they’re great), but you’re taking on disproportionate risk by running it,” said Ethereum advocate “marceaueth” stated on January 21.
