Ethereum’s growing pains show that the blockchain has a long way to go

Last week’s drama surrounding Ethereum occurred when the blockchain briefly stopped completing transactions, sparking fears that any information sent to the chain would be garbled or reversed. This apparent failure lasted about 25 minutes on Thursday, and then a bit longer on Friday, so only a handful of blocks – the units that make up a blockchain – were at risk.

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News reports cited influential Twitter accounts as saying that the problem has now been largely resolved, and that it appears to have been rooted not in the underlying Ethereum protocol, but rather in software clients used by validators — the devices that, under the new proof- at-stake system, verifies that a block and its batch of transactions are final and legitimate.

Some described the episode as a “fire drill” and noted that Ethereum more or less continued to screw up the whole time, thanks to validators’ reliance on a diverse set of software clients – including some unaffected by the bug. Ethereum folks hailed this as proof that the blockchain’s decentralization makes it resilient.

I admit the technicalities here are above my pay grade, but the fact that Ethereum only took a minor and temporary price hit suggests that the blockchain is actually good. Meanwhile, most users remained oblivious to the shutdown drama, and in any case, all kinds of software applications—including well-known ones used to keep the web running—face it from time to time.

Still, the block delays are a good reminder that Ethereum is a work in progress, especially after the big upgrade last November that implemented proof-of-stake. Meanwhile, if you want another, more glaring reminder of Ethereum’s growing pains, ask a random user to do something with the blockchain in the first place.

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I was reminded of this last week when I asked the Fortune Crypto team, as part of our effort to test drive the stuff we write about, to stake a small amount—$20 or so—of Ethereum on a consumer-facing staking service. The team quickly discovered that this was impractical since the gas fees would far exceed the amount of interest we would get from efforts.

This is a problem. While some Ethereum diehards will blow this off and say that layer-2 or some other new technology is about to fix this, the reality is that blockchains – or any other product – can only offer an atrocious user experience for so long. This is especially the case when the banks that are crypto’s biggest legacy competitors allow you to perform all kinds of transactions for little or no fee. That’s why Ethereum needs to sort out its growing pains sooner rather than later.

Jeff John Roberts
[email protected]
@jeffjohnroberts

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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