According to PANews, the Ethereum protocol's key client, Geth, has released version 1.15.2 to address a bug affecting mainnet block creation. This urgent update resolves a regression issue in the beacon consensus engine, which previously caused validators to miss block creation opportunities, potentially leading to economic losses.
The regression problem in earlier versions impacted the consensus engine's handling of mainnet block construction due to the absence of a defined MergeNetsplitBlock in the chain configuration. This change was introduced in a recent update to the beacon consensus engine, resulting in the mainnet not being recognized as operating under the Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism, thereby disrupting block creation and expected network performance. Developers explained that the regression issue originated from the removal of a testing method called TestingTTDBlock. This method was initially added during internal testing to simulate Merge blocks. After its removal, the system no longer bypassed the dependency on total difficulty, which previously allowed the engine to ignore the normal fork sequence and inadvertently enabled the Merge before the London fork.
Users running version 1.15.1 are advised to upgrade to version 1.15.2 immediately to avoid missing block creation opportunities and incurring economic penalties. Geth v1.15.2 now includes a configuration that correctly identifies the mainnet as being in a post-Merge state and restores the necessary network discovery protocol, thereby reinstating expected operational parameters.