As Holesky transitioned through the Pectra hard fork, it experienced multiple problems over a span of three weeks, pushing client software and the overall network to its limitations. As a public testing network, it was vital to rescue it from near total collapse (for science). It transitioned through a testnet specific client bug justified by a majority of validators, long periods of unfinality leading to memory explosions, storage disk limitations from multiple valid minority chain forks, searching through the dark forest for very few healthy beacon nodes and attempting to coordinate revival of a network with multiple validator groups (because we are decentralized of course!).

We will dive into what happened during the three weeks of chaos, why it happened, what the Lodestar team learned from it, how our efforts as a minority client team contributed to rescuing this network and why it all leads to one thing: Why Client Diversity is so important in Ethereum. We summarize its importance and why we need to see better distributions of client software on the network.