On Sept. 6, the Bellatrix upgrade that was gearing up Ethereum for the Merge was finally completed; however, concerns were raised about a missed block rate of almost one in ten over the previous 600 slots.
Prior to the upcoming Merge, which is scheduled for sometime next week, the Bellatrix upgrade on the Beacon Chain upgraded Ethereum consensus layer clients at epoch 144896.
Martin Köppelmann, a co-founder of Gnosis, claims that 5% of the validators went offline during the hard fork, which elevated the 9% missed block rate.
Many doubted Ethereum network’s readiness as a result of the hiccup
Some observers began to doubt the network’s readiness for the significant transition to proof of stake as a result. The 9% figure, according to Köppelmann, was 1700% higher than the 0.5% historical missed block rate. The 25.6% of clients listed by Ethernodes as “not ready” for The Merge may be connected to the problem.
Adam Cochran, a partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, expressed his hope that the “big spike” in missed blocks would be fixed prior to the actual Merge, saying, “We really don’t want to be seeing unexpected issues at this late stage.”
However, not everyone is worried. Only 5% of validators leaving the network was, in fact, “an amazing result,” according to Daily Gwei founder Anthony Sassano, who also confidently asserted that “there’s not really much that can go disastrously wrong” with the Merge.
One of the final steps before the Merge is the Bellatrix upgrade, which facilitates Ethereum consensus layer clients to conduct transactions on the Beacon Chain.
The Ethereum Merge will change the network’s consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake, which is expected to increase the network’s efficiency and security. It will also replace ETH miners and the energy-centric mining process with stakers who will be validating the transactions.