Ethereum has again hit the headlines and this time not for the approaching ETH 2.0 launch- but for its sudden chain split or hard fork which happened on Wednesday, November 11, 2020. It led to serious problems on the minority chain, forcing leading 3^rd-party service providers, Blockchair, Infura and Binance to halt withdrawal services temporarily.  Per the market reports, the hard fork was “unintended”.

However, the issue has been solved by now and 3^rd-party service providers have resumed their withdrawal services as of November 12, 2020.

It’s to note here, Infura is the infrastructure provider for Ethereum and extends API accession to ETH network for other services and applications. It was sometime after 08:00 UTC that Infura made an official announcement about encountering service outage on ETH mainnet API. The firm also stated that they had already started investigation on the problem.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao also tweeted about the problem. He suspected ETH hard fork at 11234873 block. According to his tweet (posted after the chain split), Blockchair and Etherscan were displaying two different kinds of chains as well as data post the block. He concluded the tweet assuring although Binance had closed withdrawals temporarily but on its way to resolve the glitch.

So, what caused the hard fork?

Infura has already published the details regarding the incident on its official website. According to the leading ETH infrastructure provider, the main cause behind the chain split can be traced back to various components within their infrastructure that were basically locked into an older version of go-ethereum client that faced a major consensus bug on 11234873 block. It affected various Geth versions, like 1.9.13 and 1.9.9. However, components that were running 1.9.19 as well as later remained unaffected. Infura also stressed that they were investigating the issue in detail and would soon be sharing a complete post-mortem report.

On the other hand, Nikita Zhavoronkov, the Blockchair CEO, also explained the incident in brief on Twitter. As per his tweet, sometime back ETH developers had launched an alteration in the network code which resulted in the latest hard fork, beginning from 11234873 block. His tweet came at around 07:08 UTC. Zhavoronkov further stressed that those platforms that hadn’t upgraded yet (Infura, Blockchair, some miners) got badly stuck on a minority chain (for around 2 hours).

As per the latest updates, Binance has announced reinstatement of services yesterday only (November 11, 2020)  at 10:28 UTC. Blockchair too has announced to resolve the issue by upgrading Geth nodes. 

“A sudden hard fork is always a matter of concern for a major blockchain platform like Ethereum. The ETH network is on a rise lately given the approaching launch of ETH 2.0 and any negative news this time could badly affect its market cap. It’s good that the issue did not trouble for long and got resolved the same day only”, stated Sina Estavi, CEO of rising decentralized oracle Bridge Oracle.

Despite the network outage, ETH price still shows an upward trend. On Wednesday, the ETH price showed a solid 3%+ rise.