A bug in the Ethereum Prysm client caused a 25% drop in validation participation, nearly jeopardizing finality.

According to Odaily Planet Daily, Cointelegraph monitored that shortly after the Fusaka network upgrade, due to a bug in the Prysm consensus client, validator participation on the Ethereum network dropped sharply, with a large number of voting nodes going offline.

Prysm officially announced on Thursday that its v7.0.0 client was unnecessarily generating old state when processing outdated attestations, causing nodes to malfunction. The developers recommend that users temporarily use the "--disable-last-epoch-targets" flag when starting the client as a stopgap solution.

According to data from Beaconcha.in, at Epoch 411,448, the network's sync participation and voting participation dropped to 75% and 74.7%, respectively. The 25% drop in voting participation is less than 9 percentage points away from the two-thirds majority (66.6%) supermajority required for the network to maintain finality.

The decline in voting participation roughly matches the share of validators in the Prysm consensus client, indicating that the Attestation failure was likely concentrated among Prysm validators. Previously, Prysm's share had reached as high as 68.1%.

As of press time, the Ethereum network's current Epoch (411,712) voting participation is close to 99%, and synchronization participation has reached 97%, indicating that the network has recovered. Current MigaLabs data shows that Lighthouse still accounts for 52.55% of consensus nodes, with Prysm in second place at 18%. Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano stated that if this bug had occurred in Lighthouse, the network would have lost its finality.