PANews March 6 news, according to The Block, Ethereum's Pectra upgrade encountered another obstacle in the latest testnet release early Wednesday. However, developers have found the problem and launched a fix. Tim Beiko, head of protocol support at the Ethereum Foundation, said in a message on X on Wednesday: "We are investigating a problem caused by a custom deposit contract on Sepolia, which caused problems for some EL clients, including transactions in blocks." In other words, the Pectra deployment on Sepolia seems to have damaged the testnet, causing blocks to be unable to record transactions. As a result, the testnet was basically down for about five hours. The problem seems to stem from a feature of the Sepolia deposit contract, which "emits" data related to transaction transfers and deposits instead of bundling them into one message. "Some execution clients are therefore stuck and transactions stop being included," said Rohit Jain, an executive at CoinDCX, on X.

About six hours after the bug was discovered, Beiko noted that a hotfix had been found. "The client teams have coordinated the fix and are attempting to deploy it to validator nodes. If all goes well, we will publish a more detailed update soon," he said. The testnet began propagating blocks containing the transaction about an hour before the launch, according to Etherscan. This is not the first time that the Pectra upgrade deployment has had problems. On February 24, the deployment of the Holesky testnet failed due to a validator configuration error that caused a chain split. Ethereum developers now expect the activation to take at least two weeks to complete. Pectra's mainnet deployment will only be attempted after the Holesky and Sepolia testnets have been successfully upgraded. The Ethereum Foundation had originally planned to launch the mainnet in early April, but it may be delayed due to testnet issues to ensure that these problems are not reproduced on the mainnet.