Ethereum’s most ambitious upgrade since its transition to proof-of-stake faced bugs on two major testnets, but developers fixed both.
After difficulties on Holesky, Ethereum’s (ETH) Pectra update encountered more roadblocks on Sepolia’s testnet. Tim Beiko, Protocol Support Lead at the Ethereum Foundation, said developers had already addressed the bug.
Petra went live on Sepolia on March 5, signalling the final dress rehearsal for Ethereum’s biggest hard fork after The Merge. Beiko explained that the hurdle stemmed from a bug with Sepolia’s custom deposit contract.
The bug split transaction’s transfer and deposit actions instead of batching the data into a single blockchain message. Per Beiko, ETH devs patched the issue about six hours after Pectra was deployed on the testnet.
“Validators have already upgraded and the chain is now operating normally,” Beiko tweeted on X. He added that “It’s possible that some explorers, wallets, or other infrastructure providers have issues until they also upgrade their nodes.”
Etherscan, Ethereum’s premiere block explorer, confirmed that Sepolia resumed block production with transaction settlement.
Sepolia Incident Update
We’ve identified and deployed a fix for the Sepolia deposit contract issue found earlier today. This issue was cause by Sepolia’s custom permissioned contract, which is different than mainnet.
All node operators must upgrade their nodes to the…
— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) March 5, 2025
Sepolia was the second testnet staggered by Pectra’s trial. In February, a validator misconfiguration split Holesky’s network, forcing developers to debug the upgrade and design a fix.
Holesky and Sepolia are the final bus stops for Pectra’s hard fork before mainnet deployment. Developers initially planned to unveil the upgrade on Ethereum’s primary chain by early April, but delays may be announced after obstacles in the testnets.
