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One week ago, the Ethereum network encountered a finality glitch that caused significant angst within the projects developer community.

The problem stemmed from two consensus clients, including one of the leading clients, Prysm, spending too much computing resources on processing mostly worthless block attestations a part of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.

In a report issued by the team behind Prysm, the failure to finalize while largely unnoticed by users was worse the second time around on Friday. In one epoch, client participation fell to 30.7%, which the Prysm team says was the lowest participation of any epoch in [Ethereum] Mainnet ever.

The Prysm client is run on 37.6% of Ethereum validating nodes, according to clientdiversity.org. It is developed by Prysmatic Labs, which was acquired by Offchain Labs the developers of Arbitrum in October 2022.

An Ethereum epoch is roughly 6.4 minutes and comprises 32 slots read blocks in the blockchain of 12 seconds each. The network failed to finalize on Friday for nine epochs (nearly an hour). This was long enough to trigger the first-ever inactivity leak mode, which penalizes validators that have stopped contributing to consensus.

But the damage was inconsequential: about $0.27 per validator.

In total, we estimate that 28 ETH of penalties were applied and validators missed 55 ETH or more of potential revenue, the Prysm team said. This is less than 0.00015 ETH per validator.

Prysms client began to struggle to handle incoming attestations with target checkpoints two epochs behind the then-current one. These valid attestations required clients to recalculate previous states of Ethereums Beacon chain and caused Prysm clients to exhaust their resources, resulting in a failure to meet validator clients requests promptly.

Ironically, contributing to the clients woes was the huge success of Ethereum staking post-Shapella, when withdrawals of staked ether became possible for the first time.

A sharp increase in new validators requesting to join the Beacon chain since the start of May has pushed ETH staked net of withdrawals up by about 1.3 million, to a total 20.5 million a value in dollar terms of more than $37 billion, on-chain data shows.

That has lengthened the queue to join the network by nearly 60,000 validators, meaning a new validator requesting to join today will not be active until some time in late June.

Beacon chain clients were stressed by all these incoming ether staking deposits, the Offchain Labs report explained.

When the beacon state was smaller, Prysm would be able to handle these attestations and recover appropriately. However, with the large spike in deposits and the growing validator registry size, Prysm was unable to recover this time, the team said.

The Prysm client now ignores attestations for old blocks, which the report says are generally of no value to the network. Minority client Teku implemented a similar fix last weekend.

The current majority consensus client, Lighthouse, already was programmed to drop the problematic attestations and suffered no loss of liveness. The mere existence of client diversity has been largely credited with allowing the network to recover on its own without any manual intervention.

Aside from the technical stress on the software and hardware, the incident also took a toll on some members of the Ethereum community.

Ethereums community health consultant, known as Superphiz, for one, declared he was taking some time off from Twitter, to regain some physical fitness routines and mental clarity.

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Ethereum Devs Issue Final Report on Finality SNAFU - Blockworks

Supporting Ethereums [ETH] causes is something Visa seems committed to. In another round of updates, the leading payment service provider displayed that it has been closely monitoring the blockchains ERC-4337, and focused on how it could help foster account abstraction.

How much are 1,10,100 ETHs worth today?

Developed recently, ERC-4337 allows users to automate transactions on the Ethereum blockchain with no consensus layer altercation. Besides that, the account abstraction feature on the standard enables decentralized multi-factor control and security.

Visas interest in ERC-4337 stems from its goal of expanding its presence in the digital asset and blockchain ecosystem.

By monitoring Ethereums evolving standard, the firm noted that the deployment of ERC-4337 on the Ethereum Mainnet could be advantageous for the projects compatibility with any blockchains.

This was not Visas first interaction with Ethereum. Since switching to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Ethereum has been on Visas radar.

In December 2022, the firm proposed automatic payments for its users via StarkNet, Ethereums L2 solution in the developmental phase.

Now, its latest crypto thought leadership post opined that ERC-4337 could provide an end-to-end transaction flow for its users via a mempool.

For the unfamiliar, a mempool is a blockchain node responsible for verifying and approving queued or pending transactions. In explaining the process, Visa noted that,

Users generate UserOperations through ERC-4337-compliant smart contract wallets. UserOperations encapsulate the users intent to interact with the blockchain.

Although there were still some complexities with the blockchain standard, the payment firm deployed and processed an experimental transaction on it. While the test was termed successful, Ethereum developers had once mentioned that the functionality and security were still being worked on.

Meanwhile, Ethereums development activity had recovered from a slight decrease. The metric, which measures the public GitHub contribution to the blockchain, was 50.38 at press time.

This means that developers had returned to committing codes dedicated to ensuring Ethereums functionality. While Visas experiment was aimed at increasing ETH users, the yield has not yet been reflected.

Is your portfolio green? Check the Ethereum Profit Calculator

As of 18 May, the network growth had reduced to 17,200. The metric reflects the number of new addresses interacting with a blockchain network. Therefore, the decline means that Ethereum had significantly lost traction, and new addresses had restrained from making transactions on the network.

Lastly, Visa admitted that Ethereum not fully supporting account abstraction could be a hindrance to its objectives. However, it mentioned that StarkNets developmental model has the potential to make up for the drawback.

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Ethereum: Payment giant shifts focus to ERC-4337 and this means - AMBCrypto News

Ethereum ETH/USD and Dogecoin DOGE/USD were held flat by Bitcoin BTC/USD during Fridays 24-hour trading session, in tandem with the S&P 500, which gapped up higher but fell slightly lower intraday.

The cryptocurrency sector has entered into another consolidation phase, not offering the usual volatility experienced traders and investors in the space have come to expect.

Lower-than-average volume in the sector is to blame, with traders seemingly taking a break from buying and selling cryptos as the market moves into a lull, perhaps caused by the sell in May, go away theory that often holds some truth.

Periods of higher volatility are still likely, however, and that may take place for at least a short period of time when the three cryptos break up or down from the triangle patterns they have settled into.

Regardless, traders and investors will be watching the crypto sector over the weekend for clues as to how the S&P 500 may behave next week and if Bitcoin, in particular, continues to consolidate, there may be no surprises for the stock market next week.

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The Bitcoin and Ethereum Chart: Bitcoin and Ethereum both began trading in triangle patterns on May 12, making a consistent series of lower highs and higher lows. Both cryptos are set to meet the apex of their triangle on May 23, and traders and investors can watch for big bullish or bearish volume to come in when they breach the upper or lower trend line of the pattern to confirm it was recognized.

On Friday, Bitcoin and Ethereum were forming inside bar patterns, withall of their price action taking place within Thursdays range. The pattern is neutral in this case, but Ethereums inside bar is slightly more bullish than Bitcoin's.

Both cryptos are being held down by the eight-day exponential moving average on the daily chart, but if Bitcoin and Ethereum break up from their triangle patterns, they will regain that level, which would give bullish traders more confidence going forward.

Bitcoin has resistance above at $27,133 and $28,690 and support below at $25,772 and $25,288.

Ethereum has resistance above at $1,846 and $1,957 and support below at $1,717 and $1,554.

The Dogecoin Chart: Like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Dogecoin is trading in a triangle pattern, set to meet the apex on May 22. The Shiba Inu-themed crypto is also trading in an inside bar pattern, which leans neutral.

Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, Dogecoin is trending under the 200-day simple moving average, which is bearish. If the crypto breaks up from the triangle formation, Dogecoin is likely to find resistance at that indicator.

Dogecoin has resistance above at $0.075 and $0.083 and support below at 7 cents and at $0.065.

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Bitcoin, Ethereum And Dogecoin Lay Low Into The Weekend: What To Watch - Benzinga

Khosrork

PulseChain is a smart contract blockchain which very recently launched with a rather ambitious proposition. The narrative is that Ethereum (ETH-USD), the primary smart contract blockchain, requires optimization because it is unable to sufficiently service the numerous decentralized applications straining the network. PulseChain means to decrease transaction (i.e. gas) costs and increase throughput as a solution.

The need for a more scalable blockchain is not a new narrative by any means. Since 2020, many projects have launched their own implementations of smart contract blockchains. Each of these alternative chains, or "altchains," puts a different spin to approaching the scalability issue.

Where PulseChain seemingly stands out is that it will copy the entire state of the Ethereum network and transfer that over to its own sovereign and better-optimized blockchain. This is functionally a hard fork of Ethereum. All smart contracts, addresses, private keys to addresses, and assets linked to those addresses on Ethereum will be copied over to PulseChain with the exact same access conditions. Ethereum users who had assets prior to the initiation of PulseChain would have copied assets on PulseChain. After the full Ethereum state is copied over, PulseChain will function independently from Ethereum based on the actions of its users. PulseChain's Twitter and other marketing materials tout that this is the "largest airdrop" ever. An airdrop is a promotional event used by many crypto protocols in which tokens are given to users, or "airdropped." This creates buzz on social media and garners more interest in the project.

PulseChain's "Largest Airdrop" on Twitter (Twitter)

In reality, copying the state means very little. Value on Ethereum derives mostly from a link to something off-chain, in the form of an IOU. For example, a number of fungible (ie. ERC-20) tokens are stablecoins. The two biggest are Tether (USDT-USD) and US Dollar Coin (USDC-USD). Both are tokens which can interact with smart contracts and be sent between Ethereum addresses. Both tokens are supposed to be backed 1:1 with dollars held in a reserve. Procuring 1 USDC token to the issuer of USDC entitles one to receive $1 from the issuer. The USDC token is then removed from the supply of USDC to reflect the removal of that $1 from the reserve. Another major ERC-20 token is Wrapped Bitcoin, or wBTC. wBTC is issued by BitGo, a company which holds real BTC and ensures that wBTC can be used to claim real BTC on the Bitcoin blockchain. wBTC, like USDC and USDT, is functionally an on-chain IOU compatible for on-chain trading on Ethereum.

But it goes even deeper. Most of the utility on Ethereum is based on moving these on-chain IOUs around. For example, the largest decentralized exchange, Uniswap (UNI-USD) is a protocol for trading tokens. Some of the most liquid markets on Uniswap include wBTC, USDC, USDT. Other protocols and decentralized applications tell the same story. If any of these three issuers decided to not honor their commitments, the on-chain activity on Ethereum would most likely suffer a dramatic decrease as users stop moving around their now-worthless IOUs.

So the problem with PulseChain copying Ethereum's state is simple: copying an "I owe you" does not copy the actual thing owed. Ethereum's state has value because there are a lot of IOUs on it. In order for the PulseChain copies to have value, and for PulseChain itself to benefit from this value, the IOUs issuers must default on their commitments to Ethereum-based IOUs and honor the PulseChain copies as the "true" IOUs.

The additional value of PulseChain that comes from copying Ethereum's state scales with the probability this will happen. Personally, I think the probability is extremely close to 0. And if it doesn't happen, then PulseChain's value will rest solely on its potential as an altchain to address the scalability issue.

Let's go over why it is very unlikely that any of the issuers will switch over to honoring the PulseChain copies and default on their ERC-20 commitments. First, there is a large downside in the form of legal and reputational issues. Stablecoin regulations and general scrutiny are getting tougher all over the world. A decision to suddenly default on obligations will be a horrible public relations move on the part of any IOU issuer. It would attract much more negative attention and turn many stablecoin supporters and users against the issuers. Because the on-chain economies are an integral component of the business model, issuers will not risk something like this.

Second, there is very little upside. Switching over to PulseChain does not have a feasible positive impact on the bottom line of issuers. Even if all Ethereum users just picked up and switched to PulseChain, it doesn't mean more stablecoins will get issued. It is the same amount of users, using the same amount of assets. One could argue that if PulseChain was a much more efficient chain it could prompt capital inflows into the ecosystem. This might lead to more IOUs being issued. But the flip side of this is that a more efficient chain decreases the need for a higher money supply because the velocity of money can be much faster. This would decrease the amount of IOUs and hurt the bottom line of issuers.

So the benefit of switching is pretty unclear while the downsides are large. Why would the issuers switch to PulseChain?

It is obvious that copying Ethereum's state most likely does nothing for PulseChain. But what about PulseChain's tech stack as a scalability solution? If it is much better, then perhaps that alone can be bullish for PulseChain.

Unfortunately, PulseChain doesn't have a lot to offer in this area either. A cursory glance at its website indicate that all it really offers is higher speeds, proof-of-stake (which Ethereum already is, although when PulseChain was first conceived Ethereum was proof-of-work), and lower fees. There are some mention about burning fees, which implies a deflationary token model. Burning fees or tokens is basically a share buyback. People contribute to the protocol's top line by purchasing the tokens to pay fees and this money is immediately distributed to the shareholder (in this case, tokenholder) by removing the tokens from the supply. Burning and deflation are not new in altchains. Ethereum does a similar thing too.

What is more concerning is that PulseChain does not seem to have a white or lite paper. Such documents are pretty standard in crypto. After all, Bitcoin started off with a white paper and all the major projects have something similar which outlines purpose, technology, implementation, roadmap, or mathematical concepts. PulseChain's lack of a white paper is a bit of a red flag.

PulseChain is probably meaningless in the long run. Lots of other altchains are special in their own ways, and they probably will not go anywhere either. This case study is a useful reminder for where crypto's value originates, and this is a question people have been trying to answer for a while.

It's not complicated. Value comes from providing utility to people. Crypto's utility comes in a few different forms. Coins which aim to be money must excel at providing monetary utilities. Otherwise people can and will use fiat currencies instead. Smart contract blockchains should support the creation of various useful smart contract applications. Right now, most of this utility is focused on price speculation of tokens.

The problem with the smart contract business model is that price speculation necessitates a concentration of liquidity. A vast multitude of separate blockchains which each facilitate price speculation in their own way will result in a poor trading experience for all users due to the fragmentation of total liquidity. The alternative solution for token speculation is just a centralized crypto exchange like Binance which aggregates liquidity across blockchains into a single trading venue. And today, this is exactly what we see in crypto: most people are turning away from the on-chain solutions in favor of centralized solutions.

Furthermore, the present state reveals an incongruence between crypto today and decentralization in the strictest sense. The stablecoin is paramount to smart contract blockchains because speculation PNL requires a fiat-based unit of account. For instance, no one denominates their earnings in BTC, but a lot of people will use USD to measure value. This requires an "on-chain USD" or stablecoin, which results in IOUs. These IOUs are in fact an element of centralization, which partially hurts the decentralization narrative of crypto.

The only parts of crypto which stand independently from a reliance on IOUs are coins which attempt to be money on their own. These are stuff like Bitcoin, Litecoin (LTC-USD), Bitcoin Cash (BCH-USD), and Monero (XMR-USD). These assets are no one else's liability. But when they are moved onto smart contract blockchains - usually to facilitate on-chain speculation - they generally take the form of IOUs as well.

No matter how special PulseChain's tech stack is (and it doesn't even seem impressive regardless), it will have to compete for the liquidity scattered across the major smart contract blockchains. At this point, the network effects of the incumbents are probably too large to overcome for a new chain, especially one without significant scalability improvements.

Editor's Note: This article covers one or more microcap stocks. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks.

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Ethereum's PulseChain Development: A Reminder About Crypto's ... - Seeking Alpha

The crypto industry is constantly growing, redefining the very concept of financial assets. Decentralised Finance (DeFi) is coming into the spotlight, and with its accessibility, affordability, and convenience, its no surprise to see why. Blockchain networks are the heart of cryptocurrency, and DeFi blockchains offer several altcoins the support they need. Meanwhile, the industry is also welcoming new DeFi cryptocurrencies like Big Eyes Coin (BIG), which is wrapping up its iconic presale to launch very soon.

Do Big Eyes have what it takes to take over the top DeFi blockchains like Ethereum and Avalanche? Read on to find out.

The platforms maturity also reflects in the user experience, with user-friendly wallets such as MetaMask, Argent, and Rainbow, enabling easy interaction with the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts. The extensive user base of Ethereum motivates developers to deploy their applications on the network, solidifying Ethereums position as the leading platform for DeFi and NFTs.

Can Big Eyes take over DeFi blockchains?For a while now, the brand new DeFi meme coin, Big Eyes (BIG), has created quite a stir with its presale. This was no ordinary feat, as BIG has managed to break the presale record of Ether itself. And launching on the 15th of June, BIG is preparing to take over Ethereums network as an ERC-20 token.

But this isnt just about making a fortune. Big Eyes Coin has set aside 5% of its supply to create a charity wallet that supports ocean sanctuaries. A cat has got to eat. The good intentions come from a passionate community that powers this paw-dorable coin. This is evident from their ever-so-happening Twitter handle and the 26,000-member Telegram group.

But thats not all. Their roadmap includes projects that cater to the broader investor base. There is an NFT Space, the Sushi Crew, under development.

Big Eyes Coin flaunts unmatched potential with its plethora of features and offerings. With a track record of collecting over $38.3 million in the presale stage, it is on its way to taking over the best DeFi blockchains. Try Big Eyes Coin to be a part of the next BIG thing in the crypto world.

Disclaimer: The above content is non-editorial, and TIL hereby disclaims any and all warranties, expressed or implied, relating to the same. TIL does not guarantee, vouch for or necessarily endorse any of the above content, nor is it responsible for them in any manner whatsoever. The article does not constitute investment advice. Please take all steps necessary to ascertain that any information and content provided is correct, updated and verified. Crypto products and NFTs are unregulated and can be highly risky. There may be no regulatory recourse for any loss from such transactions.

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Can Big Eyes Coin take over the best DeFi blockchains like Ethereum and Avalanche - Economic Times