- Ethereum has struggled to process blob-heavy blocks in recent weeks.
- If the problem worsens, it could threaten the stability of the network, according to a report.
- Researchers said they were not worried, but warned of a further increase in spots at this time.
Ethereum has struggled to process data-heavy blocks in recent weeks, an issue that suggests the network is not ready to take full advantage of its December upgrade.
This upgrade, named Fusaka, significantly increased the amount of data that layer 2 blockchains can send to Ethereum.
But blocks containing more “blobs” – packets of data submitted by Layer 2 blockchains such as Arbitrum and Base – are much more likely to be abandoned by the network, according to a study by MigaLabs, a research group that collaborated with Lido DAO and the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance.
If it persists or worsens, the problem could threaten the stability of the network, the company wrote in its report.
“My intention was not to be alarmist, but to send a signal to key developers and researchers saying, ‘We need to look into this,'” said Leonardo Bautista Gomez, founder of MigaLabs. DL News.
“It is important not to increase the (blob) capacity even further until we fully understand what is happening.”
Before Fusaka, layer 2 blockchains could only send a maximum of nine blobs per block to Ethereum. After the upgrade, Ethereum’s blob capacity increased eightfold. But the increases would be possible through a series of smaller upgrades.
“We could say here, in just a few minutes, increase this button 8x,” Ethereum Foundation executive Alex Stokes said during a December livestream celebrating the Fusaka rollout.
“Given that this is a very new technique and we don’t know how the network will react, this is not the wisest decision.”
The first mini-upgrade came less than a week after Fusaka and increased the maximum blob capacity to 15. The developers released a second upgrade on January 7 which increased the maximum capacity to 21 blobs per block.
Interestingly, the average number of blobs per block has decreased since Fusaka. However, the few blocks that test the network limit are more likely to cause the next block to fail, MigaLabs found.
Research from PandaOps, a team at the Ethereum Foundation, reached a similar conclusion, but found that part of the problem could be attributed to “timing games” – a practice in which validators delay releasing their blocks in order to increase a revenue stream known as maximum extractable value, or MEV.
“I’m not worried about the network right now, based on the analysis I’ve done,” said Sam Calder-Mason, the engineer who did the analysis for PandaOps. DL News.
“It was certainly concerning upon first inspection.”
There is a “rough consensus” among developers to propose a minor update that would allow Ethereum to stream blob data more efficiently and quickly before increasing blob capacity, according to Calder-Mason.
“Personally, I would reject any other BPO without it,” he said. “We will also need a series of more global analyzes before committing to a higher number of blobs. »
While Calder-Mason estimates that timing games could account for “about 90 percent of what we see with high blob counts,” Gomez was more circumspect.
“We see some correlation between high blob counts and game timing, but I still think that doesn’t explain everything I observed,” said the MigaLabs founder.
Another possible explanation is that it is simply difficult to propagate much more data across a distributed network.
“We’re really trying to emphasize network capacity as much as possible, within the limits that will keep the blockchain alive and efficient and functioning properly,” Gomez said.
“What we’re seeing now is that when we increase the amount of data we put out to the network a little too much, we see some problems. We still don’t understand exactly why this is happening.”
What worked, he added, was Ethereum developers’ commitment to being careful when making changes to the network.
“If there is a problem, we can probably resolve it,” he said. “We are following the process we had in mind perfectly. »
Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ DeFi correspondent based in New York. Do you have any advice? You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.
