Ethereum Tests Limits of Validator Participation in Gloas Devnet
Ethereum's developers are conducting a Gloas devnet exercise to test what happens when finality stops. The test involves reducing validator participation below the threshold required for finality, then seeing if client software recovers.
The Gloas fork was scheduled for September 2 at 15:00 UTC, and the devnet-9 specification describes two jobs in sequence: completing a clean Gloas transition and deliberately taking validator participation below the threshold required to finalize checkpoints.
Finality is not necessary for block production, as validators can still propose blocks, transactions can still be included, and the network can select a chain head. However, finality provides a stronger settlement guarantee that comes after validators representing at least two-thirds of staked ETH agree on checkpoints.