An unplanned hard fork might have occurred on the Ethereum network, and ETH 2.0 may not be able to handle DeFi’s growth

An unplanned hard fork might have occurred on the Ethereum network

Ethereum infrastructure providers Infura and Blockchair have reported outages, resulting in problems with exchanges and wallets.

Initially thought to be an internal Infura issue, later independent node operators also reported malfunctions. The Binance exchange has suspended the withdrawal of funds, and its head Changpeng Zhao referred to a “possible chain split” as the culprit. Crashes were also reported by the MetaMask wallet, Bithumb, Upbit and Crypto.com marketplaces.

After block 11'234'873 at 07:08 AM UTC, blockchain explorers Blockchair and Ehterscan began registering two different chains.

“It seems that a minor hard fork occurred without anyone noticing it,” said Nikita Zhavoronkov, Blockchair development lead.

Opinion: ETH 2.0 won’t handle DeFi’s growth

FTX exchange CEO Sam Bankman-Fried believes that the Ethereum network is not able to of handling decentralized finance’s (DeFi) growth.

According to him, the ETH blockchain is limiting the development of DeFi, and the only way to solve the problem is to use other networks. Bankman-Fried said that whenever his team tried to create a new DeFi project, they “immediately exceeded the throughput of the Ethereum blockchain by orders of magnitude.”

The FTX CEO believes that one day the DeFi audience will surpass 1 billion people, which means that blockchains will need to significantly expand their scalability in order to maintain a ten-digit user base. Scaling improvements on the Ethereum 2.0 network won’t be enough either, he points out.