An unknown striker prompted Ethereum developers to put a “special repair” as the network is wrestling with technical problems while upgrading Pectra on Sepolia Testnet.
In the post -cases stage a reportEtherum Marius Van Der Wijden developer revealed that the attacker took advantage of the “Edge case” that was ignored, which has repeatedly and repeatedly sent errors by sending zero transfer operations to the deposit contract, which increases the complexity of the already turbulent operation.
What happened?
On March 5, Pectra upgrade is gone live In Sepolia, but almost immediately, developers began to see error messages appearing on their contract, as well as increasing the empty lumps that are mined.
According to Van der and finds, the problem stems from the deposit contract from which an unexpected event – a transfer event instead of the required deposit event – which caused the contract to reject transactions and produce only empty blocks.
The errors were linked to the EIP-6110, which requires all records of the deposit contract to be treated uniformly.
The GETH team has launched a reform “that would ignore all the wrong records coming from the deposit contract,” but developers ignore a specific edge case in the ERC-20 standard.
“The ERC20 standard does not prevent the transmission of the distinctive symbol 0, and this allows anyone (even if he does not have any symbol) to transfer 0 symbols to another address that would emit an event from it,” explained by the “Van Der Wijdeen, adding that” the attacker “benefited from this by sending a period of time repeatedly to the deposit contract.
This led to the same error and caused the network to mining empty blocks.
Initially, the developers were suspected that the trusted auditor had made a mistake, but upon investigation, they followed the case to a recently transferred account from a public tap.
To stop the attack, developers needed to liquidate transactions that interact with the deposit contract. However, they suspected that the attacker was watching their talks, which led them to put a “special reform” to choose the Devops contract control about 10 % of the network.
Once the reform was published, the contract resumed the production of complete blocks, allowing the series to work normally by 14:00 UAE time. After a few blocks, the attacker was successfully extracted, confirming that all the workers of the node have been updated.
Despite the disturbances, ETHEREUM “has never lost the completion”, and the case was limited to Sepolia, where the distinctive deposit contract differed from the Mainnet ethereum deposit contract, according to Van Der Wijden.
However, developers decided to delay the Pectra upgrade for more tests and correct errors.
What is the Pectra upgrade from Ethereum?
Pectra Fork is designed to enhance Staking ETH, improve the expansion of layer 2, and expand the network capacity. It offers 11 proposals to improve ETHEREUM (EIPS) and represents the first major upgrade since then DenkonWhich started directly in March 2024.
As mentioned earlier by Crypto.News, developers Planning for publication Pectra on the Mainnet by April 8, provided that Holesky and Sepolia Testnets are Successful completion Their promotions.
The upgrade was carried out for the first time on the Holesky Testnet on February 24, as it also faced technical problems that prevented the completion.




















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