An Ethereum developer says the recent Pectra upgrade of the Sepolia testnet ran into errors, which was made worse after an attacker used an “edge case” to cause the mining of empty blocks.
Pectra rolled out on its final testnet, Sepolia, at 7:29 am on March 5, but Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden said in a March 8 post that the team immediately started seeing error messages on their geth node and empty blocks being mined.
The error was because the deposit contract triggered the wrong type of event — a transfer event instead of a deposit, according to Van der Wijden.
A fix was rolled out, but van der Wijden says they missed one edge case, and an unknown user exploited it by sending a 0-token transfer to the deposit address, which triggered the error again.
“After a few minutes we saw