4 posts tagged with "Erigon"

Before The Merge in September 2022, an Ethereum node was a single Proof-of-Work client. Geth, Parity, Erigon, Nethermind, or Besu, each handling everything from networking and the EVM to mining and chain selection inside one binary. The Merge split that role in two: an execution layer (EL) for the EVM, transactions, mempool, and world state, and a consensus layer (CL) for Proof-of-Stake fork choice, finality, attestations, and block proposals. The two halves talk to each other over the engine API, a JSON-RPC channel authenticated with a JWT secret.

Most operators run those two layers as two separate binaries that talk over the engine API. Caplin v3.3.10 collapses them back into a single Erigon binary. We added a Caplin standalone host to the StereumLabs fleet on April 8, 2026, and let it run alongside the classic Erigon plus CC pairings under identical mainnet conditions. This post reports what we measured: where the monolithic architecture wins, where it pays a tax, and where it leaves observability holes.

Every execution client connects to different peers, sees a different slice of the network, and churns through connections at wildly different rates. We queried Prometheus metrics and Elasticsearch container logs across our entire fleet to find out what each EC actually experiences at the P2P layer, and what it means for Ethereum's network health.

We deployed all 6 Ethereum execution clients from scratch on bare metal and tracked exactly how long each one took to fully sync. The results range from impressive to alarming.

How does each execution client behave when Nimbus asks it to build a block? We monitored 1,000 validator pubkeys across 5 EC pairings for 48 hours and found that block building performance varies dramatically, with one client producing near-empty blocks while the other four packed in millions of gas.