Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade Crashes Holesky Testnet

On Feb. 24, Ethereum developers initiated the Pectra upgrade on the Holesky test network as scheduled. However, the launch did not go as planned, as the network encountered issues with finalizing transactions shortly thereafter.

Hildobby, a data analyst at crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly, noted that the Holesky testnet had been down for nearly two hours following the Pectra launch due to “buggy code,” which caused an invalid block that most Ethereum clients accepted. Due to this, Holesky has been unable to finalize transactions.

According to the analyst, only two Ethereum clients, Erigon and Reth, operated correctly. However, the bug affected clients like Geth, Nethermind, Ethjs, and Besu.

Rectification Underway

Current data indicates that Holesky’s transaction finality issues remain unresolved. However, Ethereum developers have said they are working to resolve the problem.

In a Feb. 25 X post, Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden said that client teams had already debugged and figured out the root cause. However, “due to the complexity of the situation” and with the “majority of the nodes being on the wrong chain,” recovery was proving difficult.

Meanwhile, another developer at the Ethereum Foundation said in a Feb. 25 X post that the bug would not affect the mainnet launch and is exclusive to configuration issues on Holesky.

Pectra is one of two major Ethereum network upgrades scheduled for this year. It is set to implement several improvements within the Ethereum ecosystem, including account abstraction and Layer 2 scalability.