Ethereum community bounces again as 60% validators go offline and first inactivity leak happens

May 15, 2023

Fast Take

On Could 11 and 12, the Ethereum community noticed a loss in finality — the place over 60% of validators stopped performing duties.
Roughly 330,000 validators stopped collaborating in proof of stake on two events.
That is equal to as much as 60% of validators who went offline and weren’t performing their duties; this noticed 253 blocks not proposed on time. Solely on 4 different events had been extra missed blocks than final week’s incident.
The participation fee is outlined as a measure of community validator responsiveness, monitoring the proportion of slots that had been missed to the entire accessible. The participation fee is calculated as (Complete Slots – Slots Missed) / Complete Slots. The participation fee dropped to 96% however got here on-line shortly after to over 98%.
In line with Glassnode, each incidents didn’t have an effect on end-users to the mainnet as transactions had been being processed.
An inactivity leak occurred for the primary time; that is the place inactive validators are penalized till they’re moved out of the chain, or they start collaborating once more.
In line with Glassnode, “The quantities subtracted from validators’ beacon chain accounts throughout the inactivity leak are successfully burned, leading to much less ETH issuance throughout that point.”