PANews reported on February 18 that according to Cryptoslate, the 1.15.2 version of Geth, a key client of the Ethereum protocol, has been released to fix an error in the previous version that affected the creation of mainnet blocks. According to Go Ethereum, this emergency update solves a regression problem in the beacon consensus engine that caused validators to miss block opportunities and potentially cause economic losses.

A regression in earlier versions affected the consensus engine's handling of mainnet block construction because it did not account for the case where MergeNetsplitBlock was not defined in the chain configuration. This change, introduced in a recent update to the beacon consensus engine, caused the mainnet to not be recognized as running under the PoS mechanism, thereby undermining block creation and network performance expectations. The developers detailed that the regression originated from the removal of a test method called TestingTTDBlock. The method was originally added during internal testing to simulate Merge blocks. With the removal of this method, the system no longer bypasses the reliance on total difficulty, which previously allowed the engine to ignore the normal fork order and inadvertently enable 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 provides a configuration that correctly recognizes the mainnet as a merged state and restores the necessary network discovery protocol, thereby restoring expected operating parameters.