By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 24th, 2024
The shadow fork will allow Ethereum developers to test some key features for the Ethereum 2.0 Proof-of-Stake blockchain. This is like stress-testing the new upcoming software.
Ethereum developers continue to make progress when it comes to the most-waited upgrade of Ethereum 2.0 – The Merge. On Monday, April 11, the developers successfully launched the mainnet shadow fork while stress-testing its upcoming software.
Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden called it a “huge success” and said that the deployment had gone smoothly. “We’re very close to a historical event. We’re testing PoS on #Ethereum. Today will be the first mainnet shadow fork ever,” he said.
With various implementation nodes on the Ethereum blockchain, the team has already noticed some “seemingly minor issues”. The team will seek to optimize this over the next few weeks. Furthermore, Ethereum DevOps engineer Parathi Jayanathi said that the team had done three shadow forks for the Goerli testnet. He writes:
“We’ve done 3 shadow forks of Goerli with bugs varying from sync code to request timeouts being found. Watch the Ethereum R&D discord channels for more. Goerli-shadow-fork-3 is live for anyone to test with, rated at advanced difficulty to join”.
Shadow fork basically serves as a test environment wherein developers copy the data from the mainnet to the testnet. This testnet serves as a testing layer for developers to test different features before deploying them on the main network.
The Ethereum testnet closely resembles the Ethereum mainnet. The Ethereum shadow fork network has already processed more than 1.8 million transactions with an average block time of 13.8 seconds.
Ethereum 2.0 – The Merge
The Merge is reportedly said to be one of the biggest events for successful transitions to Ethereum 2.0. To make it a success, Ethereum developers are joining the block pieces in a step-by-step manner.
Last month, the Ethereum developer team launched the Kiln execution under Proof-of-Work. This was running in parallel to the Beacon Chain on Proof-of-Stake.
The aim of the Kiln merge testnet was to familiarize the community for running their nodes, testing infrastructure, etc. The Kiln network is now running under Proof-of-Stake as well.
The Merge upgrade ahead this year will bring us pretty much closer to the launch of Ethereum 2.0. The second iteration of the Ethereum blockchain will be Proof-of-Stake and it will drastically improve the network scalability while simultaneously reducing congestion and transaction costs.