Ethereum’s PoS move is now being tested on Eth 2.0

A shadow fork of Ethereum mainnet is being tested on Ethereum mainnet as part of Ethereum's transition to Ethereum 2.0. It was created by developers to test the upgrade before deploying it to the Ethereum mainnet.

The point of the shadow fork “stress test developers’ assumptions around syncing and state growth”, tweeted Parithosh Jayanthi, an Ethereum Foundation developer. Throughout the process, developers are finding and tackling “bugs varying from sync code to request timeout” .

“We’re very close to a historical event. We’re testing PoS on #Ethereum,”said Marius Van Der Wijden, another Ethereum software developer yesterday morning. “Today will be the first mainnet shadow fork ever.”

At the time of writing, the shadow fork has already processed 1.8 million transactions with an average block time of 13.8 seconds. 

Ethereum is working on a multi-stage transition to the proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, which will allow validators to create blocks by staking assets instead of mining based on the proof-of-work model. The latter has been heavily criticized as harmful to the environment as well as making Ethereum and cryptocurrencies the target of backlash and controversy. Hence, a successful transaction is expected to drastically reduce the energy required to validate transactions on Ethereum’s current blockchain network. 

The Beacon Chain, phase 0 of the Ethereum 2.0 launch, was launched on December 1 last year. The Merge is expected to be completed in June or early Q3 of 2022. 

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