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Ethereum Foundation Says Berlin Hard Fork Addressed 'Clear and Present' Threat

The vulnerability was first discovered in late 2019.

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 12:59 p.m. Published May 22, 2021, 9:53 p.m.

The Ethereum Foundation, the organization that supports the blockchain with the same name, said the recent Berlin hard fork that tinkered with "gas" prices and allowed new transaction types on the blockchain also fixed a longstanding "clear and present danger" to the platform.

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The flaw, which left the protocol vulnerable to attack, was an "open secret" in the Ethereum community and had been known about since October 2019, the foundation said in its blog post disclosing both the problem, and that it has now been fixed.
The foundation said it's disclosing the now-fixed vulnerability in the interest of transparency.
"We estimate that the threat is low enough that transparency trumps, and it's time to make a full disclosure about the works behind the scenes," the foundation wrote.

Ethereum Ethereum Foundation Vulnerabilities Berlin Fork

Kevin Reynolds

Kevin Reynolds was the editor-in-chief at CoinDesk. Prior to joining the company in mid-2020, Reynolds spent 23 years at Bloomberg, where he won two CEO awards for moving the needle for the entire company and established himself as one of the world's leading experts in real-time financial news. In addition to having done almost every job in the newsroom, Reynolds built, scaled and ran products for every asset class, including First Word, a 250-person global news/analysis service for professional clients, as well as Bloomberg's Speed Desk and the training program that all Bloomberg News hires worldwide are required to take. He also turned around several other operations, including the company's flash headlines desk and was instrumental in the turnaround of Bloomberg's BGOV unit. He shares a patent for a content management system he helped design, is a Certified Scrum Master, and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He owns bitcoin, ether, polygon and solana.