The 1.15.2 version of the Ethereum client Geth has been released, resolving a regression issue in the beacon consensus engine

News on February 18th, the version 1.15.2 of Geth, a key client of the Ethereum protocol, has been released with the aim to fix an error in block creation on the mainnet found in its previous version.

According to Go Ethereum, this emergency update resolved a regression issue within the beacon consensus engine that caused validators to miss opportunities for block production and potentially incur financial losses.

A regression issue from earlier versions affected how the consensus engine handled mainnet block construction because it did not account for situations where MergeNetsplitBlock was undefined in chain configurations. This change was introduced during recent updates to the beacon consensus engine and resulted in failure to recognize that mainnet operates under PoS mechanism, thereby disrupting block creation and expected network performance.

Developers detailed that this regression problem originated from removal of a test method named TestingTTDBlock which was initially added during internal testing period for simulating Merge blocks. After removing this method, system no longer bypasses dependency on total difficulty; previously this mechanism allowed engines to ignore normal fork order and inadvertently enabled Merge before London Fork. Users running version 1.15.1 are advised to upgrade immediately to version 1.15.2 so as not miss out on opportunities for creating blocks and avoid economic penalties.

Geth v1.15.2 now provides a configuration that correctly identifies mainnet as post-merge state and restores necessary network discovery protocols thus returning operation parameters back to expectations.