As the proposed date for the Shanghai Ethereum upgrade approaches, The developers have created a sandbox called a “shadow fork,” according to a January 23 tweet from Go-Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden. Apparently, the new testnet has been created to test the necessary conditions for the withdrawal of Ether (ETH) tokens in staking, which is currently disabled, but is intended to be activated in the update.
Withdrawal-Mainnet-Shadow-Fork-1 is finalizing
It started out with a few issues because the config wasn’t correctly applied on geth (we disallow overriding the mainnet config). The config is applied correctly and all nodes are in agreement. We will start some evil nodes.
— MariusVanDerWijden (@vdWijden) January 23, 2023
The name of the testnet is “Withdrawal-Mainnet-Shadow-Fork-1”. According to node provider Web3 Alchemy, a “shadow fork” is a fork of the mainnet intended to be used for testing purposes only.
Van Der Wijden declared that hel and another developer named “Potuz” will create malicious nodes that will send malicious blocks and messages to other nodes on the testnet and try to convince them to join a fake version of the network. For now, the network is running smoothly, but Van Der Wijden has stated that he wants to “see if Potuz and I can violate it”. This is apparently being done to see if the update can prevent malicious attacks or if more changes need to be made before rolling it out to the mainnet.
The launch of this testnet comes after developers have expressed their growing urgency to make staking Ether withdrawals a reality. On January 6 they held a meeting where they agreed to exclude the proposed EVM Object Format (EOF) from the Shanghai update. EOF was intended to make it easier to upgrade Ethereum in the future. But due to its complexity, the developers decided to keep it out of Shanghai for fear that it would delay the implementation of the recalls.
More than 14.5 million ETH (worth more than $23 billion at press time) have been deposited into the Ethereum staking contract and cannot currently be withdrawn, according to a December report from Nansen. In November, the creators of Ethereum came under heavy criticism for allegedly moving the deadline when it comes to allowing withdrawals.
The Shanghai update is scheduled to run sometime in March of this year.
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