The Ethereum blockchain network is in constant and urgent need of upgrades. As of February 2022, the number of tokens running on the Ethereum main network were more than 442,000; although there are quite a few ERC-20 tokens used for utility tokens, most of them function as digital currencies. Plans for a major Ethereum 2.0 upgrade have been discussed for a while; until that happens, we are pretty much left with minor adjustments such as the Arrow Glacier upgrade that has been rolling out since late 2021.

Arrow Glacier is not insignificant to ETH token miners. This has resulted in the creation of a large number of tokens that are ‘slaved’ to Ethereum via the eWASM, and that have their value based on the tokens that they receive. In the first instance, we’ll have ERC-20 tokens and ERC-223 tokens; these are the ones that can use eWASM today. But what about tokens that are not ERC-20, such as EOSIO, and what about those tokens that run natively on eWASM such as Lisk? There are no current plans to migrate those, but they could be a huge problem.

A few months ago, the EOS blockchain had a bug that resulted in a situation where nodes that were mining for tokens were not receiving any transactions at all. The issue manifested when a malicious group of malicious miners were able to manipulate the block creation process. In this instance, instead of creating blocks that were mined in a hash-like process, they were creating blocks that were full of junk transactions that wasted an unbounded amount of ETH gas.

They locked up the platform and removed access to accounts that held any tokens. The eWASM didn’t stop the development of the new version, so there was a brief period where tokens existed on both versions. However, it was quickly realised that the EOS block-creation issue had been fixed, so that version of the blockchain was put into production.

Seasoned ETH miners are not thrilled with the Arrow Glacier upgrade. What they would like to see is a real Proof of Stake network, but this is not going to happen until after Ethereum 2.0 rolls out and matures.