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- Vitalik Buterin has praised Ethereum for achieving a major milestone in the diversity of execution layer clients.
- Ethereum plans to provide multiple execution clients to work in parallel while validating blocks.
Ethereum [ETH] Ethereum has achieved a major milestone by reducing the overwhelming market share of verifier-run clients. Responding to the update, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin described it as the “sturdiness” of the ecosystem.
“No single executable has more than 2/3 of the market share. Great news for Ethereum L1 robustness.”
Source: X/Vitalik Buterin
The problem with the risk of most ETH clients
For context, verifiers who manage storage and pools use the Ethereum execution client. The dominant execution client, the one used by the majority of verifiers, with over two-thirds of the market share, is the client of the vast majority and poses risks to the entire ecosystem.
According to the vast majority The trackerHaving a large majority of clients can lead to network fragmentation and even loss of funds in case of errors.
“It has the potential to complete the chain without the consent of other clients. A consensus error within such a client would lead to catastrophic results, such as network splitting, loss of funds, and reputational damage.”
Additionally, a supermajority client may lead to consensus errors and errors on the part of validators (block proposers and validators), which may result in severe penalties through staking (destroying part of their stake/deposit).
In short, the risk of the vast majority of clients translates into the risk of centralization that could impact the entire ecosystem. According to Ethereum team leader Peter Szilagyi, impact It could even be dangerous to the chain’s reliability.
“Even worse, if a majority of validators make a mistake, the bad chain could be terminated, leading to complex governance issues around how to recover from the mistake with skewed incentives for the majority of validators not to do so. Such an event would have a chilling effect on the full adoption of Ethereum.”
In the past, Geth (Go Ethereum) was the most dominant The client implementation layer was common until recently.
Source: Ethereum
To mitigate risk, the ecosystem advocates client diversity and encourages users to choose minority clients for execution. Currently, Nethermind is the most dominant client, surpassing Geth. However, Nethermind is not an overwhelmingly dominant client at the time of writing.
Interestingly, there is something new. an offer This was created to help validating nodes validate blocks using multiple clients in parallel to further reduce the risk of supermajority.
Meanwhile, ETH price has stabilized below $2,800 after Friday’s impressive surge. It remains to be seen whether investors’ risk-on approach will continue into next week.
