The Sepolia testnet Beacon Chain has gone live, preparing the ground for its merger dress rehearsal to provide Ethereum network developers with valuable technical information.
By merging with its dedicated Beacon Chain, the Sepolia testnet will begin reaching consensus using Proof-of-Stake (PoS) instead of Proof-of-Work (PoW)which will provide data on what may happen when the Ethereum mainnet performs its merger.
The Ethereum Sepolia Beacon Chain has been deployed!
The Merge is coming https://t.co/IuJBnFp0Xx
— Crypto-Gucci.eth ᵍᵐ (@CryptoGucci) June 20, 2022
The exact date of the Sepolia merger has not been determined.
Testnet mergers are essential for Ethereum developers and independent project developers using the Ethereum network to understand what they can expect when the actual merger occurs.. Just like on testnets, the Ethereum mainnet merger will see the entire network transition to PoS consensus and should reduce Ethereum’s power consumption by 99.9%.
Sepolia launched in October 2021. Ethereum lead developer Tim Beiko confirmed in April that the Ropsten testnet would eventually be phased out and replaced by Sepolia. Therefore, projects running applications in Ropsten have been encouraged to migrate their work to Sepolia to avoid complications.
Public testnets like Sepolia and Ropsten are designed to replicate the operating conditions of their respective mainnets without affecting the mainnet. Ropsten is the longest running testnet launched in 2016. It underwent its merge on June 8, which was the first instance of a test merge for Ethereum.
The official merge date on the Ethereum mainnet has been pushed back multiple times. It is now scheduled to be completed in August 2022, but that date could be pushed back further due to another difficulty bomb delay. Once complete, it will give rise to the consensus layer, formerly known as Ethereum 2.0.
The Difficulty Bomb is a feature of the Ethereum network that will discourage ETH miners using physical devices by greatly increasing the difficulty of producing a new block.
The price of ETH has suffered a slight increase of 3.53% in the last 24 hours, now trading at $1,126 according to the Cointelegraph price index.
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