Removed "totalDifficulty" from Block Schema

With Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) through the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade, certain fields in the blockchain schema have become obsolete. One such field is totalDifficulty, which no longer holds relevance in PoS.

"totalDifficulty" Becoming Obsolete in PoS

• Under PoW, totalDifficulty determined the canonical chain by identifying the chain with the highest cumulative difficulty.
• In PoS, chain selection and block validation mechanisms rely on entirely different metrics, making totalDifficulty unnecessary for protocol operations.

Impact on Tatum

For Tatum users, this means calls to Ethereum and other EVM-compatible chains via JSON-RPC will no longer return the totalDifficulty parameter. This change aligns with updates to Erigon and the standardized execution API specification.

For further context, see the discussions in Erigon Issue #13012 and Ethereum Execution APIs PR #570.