PSA: The Importance of Multi-Client and why the Ecosystem must take it seriously

Today has shown exactly why the Multi-Client philosophy that Vitalik and the Core-devs have been discussing since day 1 is so important.

Today, Open Ethereum suffered a syncing issue after the Berlin Hard fork.

https://github.com/openethereum/openethereum/issues/353

To my amazement, we discovered that some *major* Ethereum companies were using *only* OE as their Ethereum node and no backup clients!

Etherscan — the most widely used block explorer is down.

And it seems like even Coinbase, the largest public crypto company in the world, valued at $80 Billion is only using OE, and not geth or others as backups.

"We have disabled ETH & ERC-20 withdrawals while we investigate a potential issue with the recent network upgrade. Receives will also be delayed. "

We are *lucky* that this issue didn't hit Infura and cause damage to the wider web3 ecosystem.

But this should be a warning shot across the bow for the whole Ethereum industry. *Every* company must start running at least two clients in parallel, and have their software fall-back to the backup clients if their primary one fails.

If you are a CTO in this industry, you must Immediately start a plan to implement multi-client. No excuses.