The Epoch Transition Tax
· 5 min read
Every 6.4 minutes, Ethereum's consensus clients have a problem. At the boundary between epochs, they need to do expensive work — update validator balances, compute committee assignments, tick the justification/finalization machinery. While they're doing it, the network doesn't stop. Blocks keep arriving. Attesters keep committing to what they see.
What happens to validators whose client is still mid-computation when the attestation window opens? They vote for the wrong head.