Ethereum Sepolia / Hoodi - Upgrade to Lighthouse v8.1.1

Scheduled for Mar 4, 14:00 - 18:00 UTC

Scheduled

We will be upgrading our Ethereum consensus (Lighthouse) nodes to the latest stable version (v8.1.1) to incorporate a mandatory security fix along with networking and validator client bug fixes.

Notable changes:
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- Security:
Critical security vulnerability fix affecting all prior Lighthouse versions — further details to be disclosed by the Lighthouse team in the coming days

- Bug Fixes:
Validator Client — Fixed a regression from `v8.1.0` where the VC head monitoring stream would continuously time out, causing repeated Head service failed warnings.
Networking — Fixed duplicate data columns in `DataColumnsByRange` responses caused by skip slots, which was causing peers to downscore nodes with `DuplicatedData` errors.
Networking — Snappy decoding errors are now correctly classified as `InvalidData` instead of `IoError`, fixing improper error handling in RPC message decoding.
Memory — Fixed a slow memory leak on long-running nodes caused by missing prune calls for the `observed_column_sidecars` cache during finalization
Sync — Fixed head chain processing to correctly sort by peer count in descending order, improving sync peer selection

- Networking Improvements:
Peers sending invalid RPC requests that result in decoding errors are now penalized and disconnected
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See more on the release here: https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/releases/tag/v8.1.1
Posted Mar 03, 2026 - 20:23 UTC
This scheduled maintenance affects: Ethereum (Sepolia — JSON-RPC API, Sepolia — Websockets API, Sepolia Beacon — REST API, Sepolia — Webhooks, Sepolia — Streams, Hoodi - JSON-RPC API, Hoodi - Websockets API, Hoodi — Webhooks, Hoodi - Beacon REST API, Hoodi - Streams).