3 posts tagged with "finality"

Yesterday's Plataberget post stopped at 11:15 UTC with finality still pinned to epoch 1,534. I left the same 84 validator-node cohort in place and kept watching. The extra three hours made the head-count proxy look pretty bad.

At 09:05, 57 of the 84 head gauges were already at or beyond the Gloas fork slot. That is 67.86% of the nodes, but the latest complete epoch had only 45.94% of eligible stake voting for the target. Finality did not return until 13:55, four hours and 50 minutes later.

The first committee of an Ethereum epoch has an awkward job. Its FFG target is the block being proposed in the same slot, so some validators vote before that block reaches them and some vote after.

That little race owns almost the entire target-miss surface. Across the first 14 complete UTC days of August, slot zero carried 3.12% of attested validator duties and 96.13% of incorrect target votes.

In March I wrote that Ethereum lost finality for roughly two and a half hours. It did not. The query behind that post mislabelled ordinary canonical blocks as orphans because a non-GLOBAL join ran against distributed ClickHouse tables.

The corrected March 2 peak is 0.33% orphaning, not 68.5%. Minimum canonical attestation participation was 99.10%, not 0%. The finalized checkpoint stayed exactly two epochs behind throughout the claimed incident, which is normal.