6 posts tagged with "p2p"

meta_network_name = 'mainnet' used to look like enough of a chain filter. It is not anymore.

In four complete hours after Xatu widened its execution-peer capture, node_record_execution held 3,075 peer IDs under the mainnet label. 637 of them, 20.72%, reported a genesis hash that was not Ethereum mainnet's. The sample contained 116 distinct genesis values in total.

This is not mainnet suddenly splitting into 116 chains. The label belongs to the observation path; the remote peer's genesis is a separate field.

PeerDAS now has two places where a peer can tell you how many custody groups it claims to serve. I expected the live metadata handshake to clean up the old cgc=0 ENR hole. Instead it hid it.

Teku 26.7.0 landed with a very specific operational note: QUIC p2p is enabled by default, on UDP port 9001 for IPv4. That is the kind of release-note claim that should leave a mark in the peer records if the release is actually visible on mainnet.

It did, but the shape was not "Ethereum just got QUIC." Most of the consensus ENRs I saw already had a quic port. Teku was the laggard.

A stale execution peer is not always a node that forgot the latest fork.

Sometimes it is a modern client binary sitting at the mainnet genesis block and politely telling the world it is ready for Homestead.

Across seven complete UTC days, 201 of 1,444 discovered mainnet execution node IDs advertised old fork IDs. 164 of those had the old Frontier fork ID, 0xfc64ec04, with next = 1150000.

That is not "slightly behind."

That is genesis.

PeerDAS has a tiny ENR field called cgc.

It is supposed to say how many custody groups a peer has. The boring answer would be: most peers advertise the minimum, a few advertise more, and probe results roughly follow that.

The boring answer was wrong.

Every blob you add to a block makes it slightly harder for validators to attest to it on time. This isn't a theoretical concern — it shows up in the data today, at the current limit of 6 blobs per block. When Fulu raises that limit, the cost scales with it.

The mechanism is straightforward. The cost of getting it wrong is less obvious.