Sepolia testnet’s Pectra upgrade encounters error after an attacker uses “edge case” to mine empty blocks

Ethereum recently encountered an issue during the Pectra test on the Sepolia fork, which was exacerbated by an unknown user sending zero-generation token transfers. An Ethereum developer said that the recent Pectra upgrade on the Sepolia testnet encountered an error, and the situation worsened after an attacker exploited an "edge case" causing empty blocks to be mined.

Pectra was launched on its final testnet Sepolia on March 5 at 7:29 a.m., but Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden said in a post on March 8 that the team immediately began seeing error messages on its geth node and mined empty blocks.

According to Van der Wijden, the reason for the error was that the deposit contract triggered the wrong event type - a transfer event instead of a deposit event. Although a fix was released, van der Wijden said they missed an edge case where an unknown user exploited the vulnerability by sending 0 tokens to the deposit address, triggering the error again.