Emergency Ethereum Geth patch fixes Merge omissions and prevents validators from suffering financial losses

PANews February 18th news, according to Cryptoslate, the 1.15.2 version of Geth, the key client of the Ethereum protocol, has been released, aiming to fix a bug that affected the creation of mainnet blocks in the previous version. According to Go Ethereum, the emergency update resolves a regression problem in the beacon consensus engine that causes validators to miss out on blocking opportunities and potentially cause economic losses.

A regression problem in earlier versions affected the consensus engine's handling of mainnet block construction because it did not take into account the situation where MergeNetsplitBlock was not defined in the chain configuration. This change was introduced in a recent update to the beacon consensus engine, resulting in the mainnet not being recognized as running under the PoS mechanism, thus undermining block creation and network expected performance. The developer details the regression problem originated from the removal of a test method called TestingTTDBlock. This method was initially added during internal testing and was used to mock Merge blocks. After removing this method, the system no longer bypasses the dependency on the total difficulty, which previously allowed the engine to ignore the normal forking order and inadvertently enabled Merge before the London fork.

It is recommended that users running version 1.15.1 upgrade to version 1.15.2 immediately to avoid missing block creation opportunities and incur financial penalties. Geth v1.15.2 now provides a configuration that correctly identifies the mainnet as merged status and restores the necessary network discovery protocols, thus restoring the expected operating parameters.