- 1.8 million transactions have been executed with an average block time of 13.8 seconds.
- The Ethereum Foundation claims that it will significantly reduce the energy requirements.
The Ethereum Foundation has been employing “shadow forks” to make its testnet more like the Ethereum mainnet in preparation for the eventual deployment of Ethereum 2.0. A team of Ethereum DevOps engineers found “bugs varying from sync code to request timeout” after performing three shadow forks of the Goerli testnet over the weekend, said developer Parathi Jayanathi on Twitter.
Resemblance to Live Mainnet
As the title suggests, Shadow forks are a way for developers to test new features before they are deployed to a live mainnet network, in this instance, the Ethereum blockchain. Engineers on Ethereum’s test network have improved the resemblance to the live mainnet, which now processes more than 1 billion transactions each day.
1.8 million transactions have been executed with an average block time of 13.8 seconds on the new Ethereum shadow fork network. As Ethereum’s mainnet moves are closer to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, this is an important step forward.
To verify transactions, Bitcoin miners compete against one another using the proof-of-work concept, which has been widely criticized for the amount of energy it takes. As a result of its move to a proof-of-stake paradigm, the Ethereum Foundation claims that it will significantly reduce the energy requirements of “stakers,” or network validators.
It’s been a long time coming, but Ethereum 2.0 seems to be near. On Dec. 1, 2020, the first part of the Beacon Chain went operational. According to ConsenSys and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, the next phase, nicknamed The Merge, is still in development and is anticipated to be done “by Q2 or possibly slipping into Q3,” during the Camp Ethereal event in Wyoming last month.
