What if a consensus bug splits the Ethereum chain?
An Ethereum consensus-bug chain split/halt is an ETH-centric shock: ETH leads down with BTC a smaller sympathy move and MSTR/COIN tracking. Rhymes with the May-2023 Ethereum finality incidents and the 2016 DAO-fork split that birthed ETC. Forward angle: post-Merge, a finality failure questions staking-collateral integrity (LSTs, restaking), so the contagion path runs through DeFi leverage and stETH discounts more than through BTC — that is where the real second-order trade sits.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A consensus bug causes an Ethereum chain split / halt. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Crypto confidence ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.