The developers identified the bug and released a patch that fixed it. ”We're investigating an issue caused by the custom deposit contract on Sepolia. This has caused some EL clients to have issues including transactions in blocks. ” - reported EF protocol support manager Tim Beiko. The reason was the ”oddities” of the said contract, which issued two events (transfer + escrow) rather than one. As a result, some EL-clients ”choked” and stopped enabling transactions. It took six hours to fix the bug. The activation of Pectra in Sepolia followed similar actions in Holesky on 24 February, which at some point led to a failure with slot finalisation ”due to a configuration issue on three major clients”. Specialists also had to issue a software update. Despite the bugs discovered, the team did not postpone the rollout of the update to Sepolia to a later date. Pectra is formed from the names of two previously planned hardforks Prague (for the execution level) and Electra (for the consensus level). The EIPs include improvements in the context of account abstraction , make significant changes to validators, and aim to improve overall network performance. Earlier, the security team opened a bounty programme to stress-test the hardfork until March 24 with a prize pool of $2 million. As a reminder, Ethereum is facing ”intense competition” from rival blockchain projects like Solana, according to analysts at JPMorgan. In February, developers noted the feasibility of reducing the frequency of activation of network upgrades from a year to six months.
