Ethereum Developer Discovers Problem Prior to Shanghai’s Shapella Upgrade

In a recent update, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko shared that a vulnerability with the public test network Shapella was discovered by developer Marius VanDerWijden. The issue arose during the synchronization of empty blocks, which do not contain any transactions or withdrawals, and other clients also reported experiencing the same problem.

Upon investigation, the team found that Go Ethereum (Geth) client nodes were struggling to sync with the Zhejiang testnet, however, they believe the issue can be easily resolved with a patch.

“The last 4 and a half stressful hours of debugging culminated in this amazing bug fix. We got reports that geth nodes wouldn’t sync the Zhejiang devnet correctly. The issue was that if a block body was empty (no tx, no withdrawals) we wouldn’t initialize it correctly.”

To ensure that the issue is resolved correctly, an additional Hive test has been proposed. It is worth noting that Ethereum core developers do not believe that the issue will impact the upcoming Sepolia upgrade scheduled for February 28 at 4 AM UTC. The client releases for the upgrade and a blog post regarding the same will be announced early next week.

The Shanghai upgrade, which is set to take place in March, will enable the withdrawal of Ethereum staked as well as rewards on the Beacon chain, and is triggered by three testnets: Zhejiang, Sepolia, and Goerli. Shapella refers to two Ethereum upgrades, “Shanghai” and “Capella,” which allow withdrawals on the execution layer and enhance the Beacon Chain consensus layer. In addition, other changes will reduce gas fees on the network.

During the Ethereum All Core Developers Conference Executive meeting on Thursday, a range of topics were discussed, including 4844 transaction changes, SSZ, RPC, and SELFDESTRUCT improvements.

Assessing the Potential Impact of the Ethereum Upgrade on its Price

The Shanghai upgrade is one of the most eagerly awaited changes since the Ethereum Merge in September, with ETH stakeholders eager to remove their Ethereum staked on the beacon chain.

As the Shanghai upgrade approaches, Ethereum staking has been on the rise, with 16,692,823 ETH staked on the beacon chain and 519,517 active validators.

Experts predict that the ETH price will fluctuate massively near the upgrade, with a retest of $2,000 likely.