Ethereum’s upcoming Fusaka upgrade is undergoing rigorous testing, but recent developments on Devnet-3 revealed unexpected non-finality issues. While some clients performed stably, others faced significant delays & syncing bottlenecks.
Developers are now preparing fixes and planning the next phase, Devnet-5, which will act as a stability checkpoint before Fusaka progresses toward mainnet activation.
Devnet-3 Non-Finality Issues
Ethereum’s Devnet-3, expected to run in non-finality for only two days, extended nearly a full week due to unexpected challenges. The prolonged instability highlighted weaknesses in validator exit processing and syncing reliability across different clients.
Developers emphasized that such extended periods of non-finality were crucial for stress-testing, even if they revealed serious inefficiencies.
Client Performance & Bottlenecks
Performance varied widely across clients:
- Prysm nodes remained largely stable throughout testing.
- Lighthouse, Lodestar, and Nimbus encountered memory leaks & syncing delays, reducing participation levels to only 50–55%.
- Efforts to restore finality included targeted validator exits, but these processed slower than expected, exposing bottlenecks that need immediate resolution before advancing to broader testnet deployments.
Roadmap Toward Devnet-5
To address these challenges, core developers plan to introduce client-side fixes (from Lighthouse, Teku, & Lodestar) before rerunning another non-finality test. If results show strong recovery, Ethereum will launch Devnet-5 as a “fix-only” validation stage.
Devnet-5 will serve as a checkpoint to confirm ecosystem stability, ensuring Fusaka rolls out on a tested, secure foundation before scheduling public testnet forks.
The difficulties on Devnet-3 underline the importance of Ethereum’s careful upgrade path. By diagnosing client weaknesses and reinforcing validator exit efficiency, developers are laying the groundwork for a more resilient network. With Devnet-5 on the horizon, the community moves closer to a stable & secure Fusaka release.
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