Ethereum 2.0 is coming. Today a test of great importance was carried out that may define the date of the merger (“The Merge”), a stage in which mining and staking will coexist.
Hours ago, on the Beacon Chain, the Ethereum 2.0 network, was carried out for the first time what is called a shadow fork (shadow fork), i.e. an exact copy of the network. There, stress tests were implemented by deliberately entering errors into the system to see its behavior.
Unlike what happens in test networks, the chain of blocks produced by a shadow fork shares all the information of the original network. For this reason, it is as if we were working on the “mother” network.
Marius Van Der Wijden, developer of the Ethereum Foundation, rated what happened as “a historical fact”. Jayanthi Parithosh, one of the developers who spearheaded the task, was also very enthusiastic.
According to reports Parithoshthe test was a complete success with only a few minor hiccups on Ethereum clients like Besu and Nethermind.
In a tweet of his own, he made reference to a meme in which the Ethereum merger is seen as if two panda bears merged with each other.
Along with this, Parithosh also confirmed which are currently undergoing a shadow fork on Goerli, an Ethereum proof-of-work (PoW) testnet.
The shadow forkaccording to accurate Parithosh, allow to imitate the main network, but in shorter periods of time. While the merger date is set, new ones will be created and destroyed shadow forks.
This fork of the Ethereum Beacon Chain has your block explorer that shows, in real time, the status of that network.
Ethereum 2.0 just around the corner
The Ethereum development team continues to pick up the pace to meet the proposed dates. As announced by the Ethereum.org website, the merger would arrive for the second quarter of the year 2022.
The attitude of the developers on that roadmap seems to be quite optimistic. Van Der Wijden, for example, recently announced that the technical aspects of the merger, had already been added, in a first stage, to the main Ethereum client, Geth. That software runs on more than 80% of the nodes, currently.
Another Ethereum Foundation researcher known under the pseudonym Superphiz has speculated that the merger will come in June, taking advantage of the release of the difficulty bomb, which was rescheduled in December of last year for mid-2022.
Although there does not yet seem to be a definitive date, the technical advances that the Ethereum team has achieved, indicate that the merger could indeed take place by the middle of the year.