2 posts tagged with "execution-clients"

Every 12 seconds, your execution client gets a new block and has to tell the consensus layer: valid or not. The call is engine_newPayload, and how long it takes determines how fast your validator can attest to the new head.

That window matters. A faster EL client means earlier head votes, better attestation accuracy, and more flexibility in how you run your validator. The timing game, MEV extraction, and late block handling all happen inside this gap.

So which execution client is fastest? The data is messier than the win-rate leaderboards suggest.

One month after Pectra went live, roughly 44% of all Nethermind validator nodes are rejecting a blob retrieval call that was introduced in that very fork. Every other major execution client has mostly fixed this. Nethermind hasn't moved.

This is the data on what's happening, why it matters, and where the fault line sits.