With this success, Ethereum developers will now gear to implement The Merge upgrade ahead this year in August 2022. The developers are still working on some minor bugs and will monitor the Ropsten network performance over the next few weeks.
On Wednesday, June 8, Ethereum developers successfully completed the Merge upgrade for the Ropsten testnet. The developers merged Ropsten’s proof-of-work chain with its Proof-of-Stake chain.
This is a key milestone for the entire Ethereum community which suggests that we are on track with ‘The Merge’ upgrade coming to the Ethereum mainnet this August 2022. Before the Ropsten Merge, the developers had to decide on the “Terminal Total Difficulty (TDD)”.
This is nothing but a pre-decided difficulty value at which the Ropsten Merge happens. There was a minor 2-hour delay for the Ropsten testnet to hit the TDD.
Some of the major client software teams participating in the Ropsten merge include Lodestar, Lighthouse, Prysm, Besu, Nimbus, Erigon, Teku, Nethermond, and go-Ethereum. In a live stream on Wednesday, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, said:
“I mean of course, the merge working well for 6 hours isn’t evidence of complete success. There are all of these kind of longer term issues around MEV and staking centralization and protection against DOS attacks and things that could potentially bite us 3 weeks after the merge instead of 2 minutes during the process.”
Time Beiko, a lead developer at the Ethereum Foundation also said that with Ropsten now moving to Proof-of-Stake, several other testnets will shut down by the end of the year.
With Ropsten now on PoS, friendly reminder that many testnets will be shut down by EOY:
– Kiln: shut down soon after mainnet merge ❌
– Rinkeby: won't be merged, shut down by EOY ❌
– Ropsten: merged today, shut down by EOY ❌Goerli & Sepolia will be maintained post-merge 😁
— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) June 8, 2022
What’s Next for Ethereum?
The successful Merge on the Rposten testnet will boost Ethereum developers’ and validators’ confidence. Over the next month or so, these people will be working on getting The Merge upgrade to the Ethereum mainnet. One of Ethereum Foundation’s lead validators, Paritosh, said:
We’re going to monitor the chain over the next few weeks to make sure no client pairs go out of sync. We’d hope that community members raise alarms if they see dapps/tooling not work as expected! Sync nodes in weird ways to find bugs! Send txs!
There have been minor bugs that emerged during the Ropsten Merge, however, they seem to be manageable and developers are working on this matter.
On the other hand, Ethereum supporters are also preparing for the mainnet upgrade. “There is over $22.78B in value staked and ready for the upcoming main-net Merge to Proof-of-Stake. This represents 12.8M $ETH = 10.78% of supply,” on-chain data provider Glassnode reports.
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